Grant Ellis is not making a big deal about being only the second Black star of “The Bachelor.” His focus is on finding true love.
“My experience has been great,” the former pro basketball player and current day trader said last week during a video call. “It’s been a whirlwind — a lot of emotion, a lot of decision-making. But overall, it’s been great. I have no complaints.”
Though Ellis is focused on romance, the 29th season of the show, launching Monday, will be scrutinized as perhaps the most crucial test yet for the popular ABC franchise, which has continually been accused by critics and previous Black participants of racism and cultural insensitivity since its 2002 premiere. Despite pledges by executive producers to correct past wrongs, troubling misfires in the handling of race in recent seasons of “The Bachelor” and spinoff “The Bachelorette” have cast doubt over those promises to improve, placing added significance on Ellis’ turn in the spotlight.
His quest for love as he dates 25 women competing to be his wife comes four years after the season starring Matt James, the first Black Bachelor, became the most disastrous for the franchise, tainted by an uproar after photographs surfaced of contestant Rachael Kirkconnell at an antebellum South-themed party. Then-host Chris Harrison defended Kirkconnell in a combative interview with former “Bachelorette” star Rachel Lindsay on “Extra,” where she was a correspondent, which stoked the controversy further and eventually led to Harrison’s departure from the franchise after nearly 20 years.
James later charged the all-white producing team of betraying their promise to show him as an accomplished Black man who had overcome many personal and professional challenges. Executive producer Bennett Graebner said in an interview with The Times last year that the show “let Matt down” and that production resources had been established that were not in place during James’ season, “which went wrong on so many levels.”
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Ellis sidestepped questions about the past struggles of the franchise and James’ season.
Grant Ellis is the center of the 29th season of “The Bachelor.”
(John Fleenor / Disney)
“I think Matt handled himself really well, but the takeaway I have is really about my season,” he said. “The way my season turned out is great. I wish Matt the best at what he does, and I’m sure he’ll do great things.”
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(Notably, James announced on Jan. 16 that he and Kirkconnell, who became a couple after departing the franchise, have split up.)
When pressed on whether he had any reaction to James’ complaints, Ellis was tight-lipped. “I watched the season but really didn’t get involved in all the controversy. I saw the love story that unfolded. As far as anything else, I really don’t have a lot to say.”
Graebner and fellow showrunner Claire Freeland were not available for comment.
While the participants on “The Bachelor” and spinoff “The Bachelorette” have become more diverse after years of featuring predominantly white casts, the franchise has not turned the corner on its troubled past. The problems include the bullying of contestants of color by the Bachelor Nation fan base and accusations that producers failed to protect its stars from the harassment, as well as spotty vetting that allowed contestants who had posted racially offensive content on social media to appear on the show.
The backlash escalated during the most recent season of “The Bachelorette” starring Jenn Tran, the first Asian woman to lead the franchise.
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While Graebner and Freeland promoted the milestone of Tran’s casting, they acknowledged the forward movement was diminished by the near-absence of Asian suitors.
The season evolved into another debacle in the live finale when a distraught Tran revealed that the man she had chosen as her husband-to-be, Devin Strader, had ended their engagement a month before the broadcast. Strader joined Tran onstage minutes later, and she wept as the footage of her joyous proposal to him was played back. Viewers accused the show of cruelty in making Tran relive her heartbreak on live television.
Reports surfaced following the finale that Strader had been arrested in 2017 on suspicion of burglarizing the house of an ex-girlfriend. He had not informed producers of the arrest when he was interviewed for the show.
Graebner and Freeland declined to comment on why Strader’s arrest was not discovered in the vetting process. They also refused comment on why Jodi Baskerville, who became the franchise’s first Black executive producer in 2021 after the racism scandal that upended James’ season, departed during Tran’s season.
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.
Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.
The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”
“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”
The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.
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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.
(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)
Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”
“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”
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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.
Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.
“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”
“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”
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