Summer Friday on a Tuesday

Met Gala fakes, and new centaur dropped.

Author

Rusty Foster
May 7th, 2024

Let’s play a game: 

Three of the following Met Gala pictures are A.I. fakes. See if you can tell which ones.

1. Greta Lee

2. Katy Perry

3. Lauren Sánchez

4. Cardi B

5. Lana Del Rey

6. Rihanna

7. Zendaya

8. Zendaya

9. Cole Escola

10. Demi Moore

How did you do? I’ll put the answers in a footnote. Oh also, I lied: only two of them are fake. Now how did you do?1  

TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling collected the best fakes that made the rounds yesterday; real pictures via Times Styles’ “20 Unforgettable Looks at the Met Gala” and purported “only person in the Greta Lee Hive” Jude Doyle. I know some of you are hollering “IT WAS OBVIOUS!” but putting this together messed with my head. Has anyone ever looked less convincing than Lauren Sánchez? And even Katy Perry’s mom was fooled by what I thought was the faker-looking fake Perry.

Town & Country’s Erik Maza panned the Gala looks, calling them “a field of corny hydrangeas,” and also “the exhibit the Met Ball ostensibly celebrates, ‘Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion’.”

At its worst, "Sleeping Beauties" ushers the Met into its immersive Van Gogh era. For anyone who cared to step inside the Dutchman's "Irises" when those projection shows were all the rage now you can also pose for selfies besides an Yves Saint Laurent jacket inspired by the same painting. Scents are piped into some galleries, soundscapes are created for others. Artificial intelligence is name-checked in the exhibition notes. It's all very Museum of Ice Cream.

This probably counts as a savage roast in fashion-curation circles, but Maza wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me (literary feuds). In Flaming Hydra, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd roasted the Met Gala, Anna Wintour, John Galliano, Coco Chanel, the rest of the fashion industry, and the “flesh of the foundational U.S. mythos,” which “is rotting and falling away, so that its ugly bones are finally laid bare all at once” as Israeli tanks roll all the way to the Rafah border crossing.

New Centaur Dropped:

Two large sculptures which are basically the back half of a horse, and the front half of a radial aircraft propellor engine. Like a centaur without front horse legs of a human half, but with an airplane engine.

It’s not really new, this is Czech sculptor David Černý’s “Pegasus,” from 2017. There’s one in the Prague airport. The propellors spin!

Substack pivots to YouTube. Sure, I don’t know, whatever. RIP Panera death lemonade. RIP Refinery29 and its “new CEO Cory Haik.” Previously in Cory Haik. Even more previously in Cory Haik.

@cantorsdust posted: “Awful news--there were 2 volumes of the collected work of Hegel in the library and the protestors broke in and left 2 more”

There’s not a lot to read in Tabs today because I haven’t seen much that’s held my interest this week. I couldn’t make myself care about Honor Levy’s short stories. I’m sure her mother is very proud, or I’m sorry about her mother, but I ain’t reading all that. Everybody says the Zadie Smith thing in The New Yorker is weird, but the first paragraph is made of Ambien so I guess I’m never going to find out what else is wrong with it. And the song of the moment is by… Macklemore?

I’ll admit, he’s finally mackling the correct amount. But how about we turn this relationship around and you hit reply and email me anything you read this week that made you feel some type of way other than “sure, I guess.” Am I out of touch? Are the kids wrong? Is it summer already?

Today’s Song: Petey, “The River”

I mean it, send me your link of the day. I’m dying of boredom out here.

1  The only fakes are number two and number six, unless one of the Zendayas was a robot which… there’s no proof. Also he’s not pictured here but the real Jeff Bezos is an AI.