Skip to main content

Which is the true reality? That dress, Yanny and Laurel and our fantasy-land politics

With smartphone cameras and digital message trails, ‘what actually happened’ is more available to us than it has ever been. So why is public life saturated in both illusion and delusion?

When Melania Trump recently visited the detention centres at America’s southern border while wearing a jacket printed with the words “I really don’t care do u?”, the responses of Washington pundits were sharply divided. For one side, the jacket was a message; for the other, there was no message. As the MSNBC journalist Chuck Todd joked: “Perhaps this is like Laurel and Yanny and gold dress and blue dress … each opinion is right yet somehow also completely wrong.” Those two globally popular memes produced a lighthearted, absurd sectarianism that reflects the polarised nature of our times.

It took about three years for us to find a worthy successor to “that dress”’, whose true colours split the planet. Was it blue and black or white and gold? The illusory garment provided what is often called now a “teachable moment”. One implication for those in the wrong – the dress is actually blue and black – was obvious: we can’t trust the stubborn certainty of our perceptions. It also offered clear proof that others’ experience of reality can be at odds with our own. That dress was like a miniature morality play about the vulnerability of our beliefs and the subjective inner lives of others, all captured in a meme.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2tF9u9I
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more