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| Louie Anderson (as Christine Baskets) and Elif Pettersen's Portrait of Eivind Hagale (1870) |
The Internet's new toy is the
Google Arts & Culture app, specifically a feature that searches the world's museums for the user's doppelganger. Download the app, snap a selfie, and Google does the rest. Kumail Nanjiani posted this one on Twitter:
It doesn't have to be a selfie. The app also works with celebrity photos taken off a laptop or desktop screen. It usually isn't fazed by glasses, facial hair, headgear, cropping, gender fluidity, or mugging for the camera.
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| Donald Trump and Joseph Ducreux's 1783 Self Portrait, Yawning (at the Getty Museum) |
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| Oprah Winfrey and Winslow Homer's Under a Palm Tree (1886) |
Results vary. Google matched a photo of Oprah Winfrey to various portraits of black women, none looking especially like Oprah. It seems all black women look alike, in beta-release. My guess is that, with fewer women of color in the Google Arts & Culture dataset, the chance of finding a close match is less. (Should anyone want to do a piece on the many Google faces of Oprah, be my guest.)
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| Other Google avatars of Oprah: Ernest Crichlow's Woman in a Blue Coat (1948) and Evelyn Joyce McCrea's Isidanga (c. 1935-36) |
More matches, white-male department:
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| Harvey Weinstein and Max Liebermann's Portrait of Alfred von Berger (1905) |
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| Bernie Sanders and Barend Lenardus Hendriks' Portrait of Rudolph Anne Jan Wilt Baron Sloet van de Beele (1861-1886) |
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| Steve Bannon and the woman with glasses in Murillo's Four Figures on a Step (c. 1655-60) |
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