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Elton John Promotes New Oz Book Amid Intense AI Art Controversy | Celebrity Insider

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Elton John Promotes New Oz Book Amid Intense AI Art Controversy | Celebrity Insider
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The pop icon, Elton John, has revealed the astonishing news about a forthcoming graphic novel called ‘The Lost Lands,’ in which he has provided the foreword that is originally meant as the first chapter of the Ultimate OZ Universe. This animation ushers in the extinction of L. Frank Baum’s original Oz tales, which John retells were his sources of inspiration during lonely childhood days in Pinner, England. However, the good news was soon getting mixed with thousands of comments that blamed the artwork connected with it for being done by a machine, thus triggering a heated debate about the meaning of art in the digital age.

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In his announcement, Elton John shared his personal tie to the Land of Oz. He described himself as a “very lonely” boy when he discovered Baum’s stories and the stories “multiplied” his own imagination and gave him “a wonderful life of storytelling, imagination, and creativity.” He expressed his wish that the public would be as fond of “The Lost Lands” as he is, presenting it as a great inheritance of Baum’s legacy declaring “the triumph of good.”

The comments were anything but pleasing. The very next hour the comments section had turned into a battlefield discussing whether the paintings had been created by human hands or AI. The detractors were pointing out anatomical errors that they were confident had come from AI and thus gave away its production. One person said, “Just take a look at the hands with your own eyes in the second image. One of them has 7 fingers and some of them have none.” Another person remarked, “In the second slide notice how short the guy’s arm is, he’s at the bottom in the middle. It’s AI.”

A few of the netizens were sorry for the situation, recognized John’s talent and help but were aware of the fact that he might be backing AI art. One user expressed, “It’s unfortunate that my favorite artist resorts to technology that is taking away jobs from other artists,” and added a crying emoji. Another user commented, “If you can’t afford AI, hire artists.” Also, some users shared their worries about the planet and one of them referred to it as “the water-wasting resource-burning climate-changing planet-warming AI slop.”

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The discussion was getting hotter and at the same time, the defenders of the artwork were coming forward. A lot of comments were mentioning that the artist Mike Deodato was credited in the project. “The artist is literally mentioned in the post this isn’t AI!” a user insisted. Another said, “Those who see this as AI-generated are presumably the ones without brains THE ARTIST IS LITERALLY TAGGED IN THE POST and if you had more than two brain cells you would recognize that this is the work of a very talented artist.”

The skeptics responding to the defense right away argued that the use of AI by established artists raises an even bigger ethical question. “It’s not right when non-artists make ‘art’ with AI, but it’s even worse when established artists are doing that in their works,” one person said. Another remarked, “A name attached to it doesn’t change that. Just take a look at the hands in the second photo.”

The whole issue was ringing a bell of a very serious ethical question regarding disclosure and consumer rights. One enlightened user wondered, “If it is the case, is that at least being disclosed to buyers? People should know if what they are purchasing was made by AI or not, regardless of their opinion. The consumers should be able to make informed choices.” This point illustrated that the AI art debate is actually about the purity of art versus the legitimacy of the market.

Amidst the arguments, some supporters were rejoicing the project. The official Ultimate OZ Universe account posted, “It’s incredible and an honor to have Elton John be a part of our Ultimate OZ Universe graphic novel.” Another admirer commented, “I adored this book SO much, what a fantastic new take on Oz, which has always been my personal and preferred mythology.” John himself humorously questioned if anyone noticed “familiar faces in the artwork,” tagging his husband, David Furnish. This project also brings to mind his most ornate album cover ever.

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The magnitude of the reaction has highlighted the societal concerns about the impact of AI on the creative fields. What started as a sincere homage of Elton John to a character that inspired him during his childhood turned into an unintended battleground in the discussion about technology, art, and authenticity that is still going on. As the AI devices become more skilled and easier to access, the matter of distinguishing between human creativity and machine production becomes more complex. The passionate responses from both sides show that the separation is of utmost importance to many, whether they are pointing out the mistakes in a tin man’s hands or debating the very existence of art as we know it. This situation is reminiscent of Big Boi’s behind-the-scenes moment with Elton John and Janelle Monae, showing how artists collaborate across genres. The discussion also brings to mind Ozzy Osbourne’s final memoir and its success. Fans of Elton John’s retro Captain Fantastic ad will appreciate this new creative direction. Finally, Elton John’s reflections on his early career with Bernie Taupin show his long-standing commitment to artistic collaboration.

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What the postcards leave out: 5 moments in history that still echo along Route 66

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What the postcards leave out: 5 moments in history that still echo along Route 66
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Richard Mitchell, 84, of Albuquerque in 2016. Mitchell used the Green Book to drive across the United States in 1964. The travel guide “assured protection for Negro travelers.”

(Photo by Craig Fritz / For The Times
)

Forty-four of the 89 counties along Route 66 were sundown towns, communities where it was encouraged for Black people to leave before dark — or else. Route 66 diners, motels and gas stations routinely refused service to Black travelers. In 1936, a Harlem postal worker named Victor Green began publishing the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide to the hotels, restaurants and gas stations along the route that would serve Black travelers. More than 1,400 tourist homes (private residences that took in guests when hotels wouldn’t) were listed during the guide’s run.

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For Black families on Route 66, the Green Book was as essential as a spare tire. In Tulsa, the Greenwood District was once known as “Black Wall Street.” White thugs destroyed it in the 1921 Race Massacre. The community rebuilt and became a hub of Black commerce near the route. Springfield, Ill., was one of the first cities on Route 66 to offer services to Black travelers. It was also the site of the 1908 Race Riot, which helped spur the founding of the NAACP.

Lily Ho, 78, holds a photo of the Hayes Motel in Los Angeles. Her family has owned the motel for nearly 40 years

A vintage photo of the Hayes Motel in Los Angeles. It was featured in the Green Book, which listed places that served African Americans during the era of segregation.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

See what remains today: Only about 30% of Green Book sites along Route 66 are still standing. The DuBeau in Flagstaff, Ariz., once a Green Book listing, now operates as a motel. The recently shuttered Clifton’s in downtown Los Angeles sits at 7th and Broadway, the original terminus of Route 66. Route History Museum in Springfield is the only museum in the country dedicated to the Black experience on Route 66, housed in a 1930s Texaco station one block off the road. It offers a virtual reality experience that walks visitors through the Green Book cities of Illinois, including sundown towns.

Beyond the Green Book, other businesses that are worth a visit include Threatt Filling Station in Oklahoma, a Black-owned gas station (and safe haven for Black travelers) during the era of segregation, and the neon sign from Graham’s Rib Station, a beloved Black-owned restaurant for many years. It’s located at the local History Museum on the Square in Springfield, Mo.

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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.

“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”

The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”

L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.

The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.

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Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.

“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”

A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.

The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”

Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”

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The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”

The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.

All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.

Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.

At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.

“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.

Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.

But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”

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The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.

Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.

With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.

The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.

When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.

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“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.

Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)

In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.

“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.

The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.

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These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.

Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”

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