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CBC
6 days ago
- Politics
- CBC
Behind the Surrealists' obsession with Indigenous masks
Watch the documentary So Surreal: Behind the Masks on CBC Gem and YouTube Indigenous masks from B.C. and Alaska influenced the work and world view of some of the most well-known modern artists and writers. In the 1930s and '40s, European Surrealists were obsessed with masks from the northwest coast of North America, many of which had been stolen, seized by the government or sold by people who didn't have the right to sell them. In So Surreal: Behind the Masks, Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond investigates how the pieces ended up in the hands of some of history's greatest artists, influencing the work of Max Ernst, André Breton, Joan Miró and others. Diamond begins his quest in New York, where a century-old Yup'ik mask is selling at a high-end art fair alongside works of modern art. Always fascinated by the intersection of Indigenous and mainstream cultures, Diamond attends the fair and learns the mask was once in the hands of the Surrealist Enrico Donati — and that Donati wasn't the only Surrealist who collected Indigenous masks. Intrigued, Diamond sets off to find out how the pieces ended up in Surrealist collections to begin with. Image | SoSurreal-2 Caption: A collage of photos from So Surreal: Behind the Masks shows Surrealist artists and anthropologist (and part of the Surrealist entourage in New York) Claude Lévi-Strauss, bottom right, with their collections of Indigenous masks and other items. (Rezolution Pictures) Open Image in New Tab Diamond's journey takes him to Yup'ik territory in Alaska and down the coast to the lands of the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw on B.C.'s southwest coast. These were hot spots for collectors, who came to trade and purchase ceremonial masks at the turn of the 20th century under the guise of salvaging artifacts of "the Vanishing Indian." But some of the masks had been stolen. As Diamond traces the movements of the masks in the early 1900s, he learns of a missing ceremonial raven transformation mask, which was taken from the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw on Canada's West Coast more than a hundred years ago. Image | SoSurreal-4 Caption: The Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw raven transformation mask, top centre — surrendered under duress in Alert Bay, B.C., in 1922 — is currently in the hands of the Duthuit family. (Royal BC Museum) Open Image in New Tab Juanita Johnston of U'mista Cultural Centre and art dealer Donald Ellis have been trying to recover it. Although currently held by the family of French art critic Georges Duthuit, the mask's exact whereabouts are unknown. (The family has not responded to the community's requests for its return.) In search of the Surrealist collections, and with an eye out for the missing mask, Diamond goes back to New York, where the Surrealists and their entourage had stumbled upon the masks during their exile in the Second World War. Then he follows the trail of the masks across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris, where the Surrealists returned after the war, with their acquisitions in hand. Image | SoSurreal-3 Caption: Ceremonial masks were bought, traded and stolen by museum collectors. In some cases, the items were purchased from people who didn't have the right to sell them. Many remain in museums and private collections today. (Rezolution Pictures) Open Image in New Tab In Paris, Diamond meets with Yup'ik storyteller and dancer Chuna McIntyre, who's in Paris to reconnect with the Yup'ik masks that were formerly in Surrealist collections and now hang in museums like the Louvre. Along the way, Diamond meets art scholars and contemporary Indigenous artists who explain the profound impact of these masks on the art and world view of the Surrealists. And throughout his journey, he continues to look for clues about the missing mask. Will the community finally bring it home? So Surreal: Behind the Masks is a detective story, which delves into the complex world of repatriation and access while exploring the meaning and importance of the masks and how they came to influence an iconic art movement.
Mint
27-05-2025
- Mint
Rahul Matthan: Brace for a wave of AI-enabled criminal enterprise
When Wolfgang Beltracchi was finally apprehended in 2010, he had been fooling the art world for nearly four decades. The secret of his success was not in creating perfect replicas of existing works of art, but in convincing buyers that what they were purchasing was real. Beltracchi was, first and foremost, a storyteller. Even before he painted the first stroke, he concocted elaborate narratives about the work he was about to create. He focused on artists with gaps in their catalogue to ensure that what he sold was all the more plausible and created artificially aged photographs to corroborate their provenance. As a result, he could create (and sell) works of famous artists that he convinced his buyers were real. The La Forêt that he, most famously, sold wasn't a replica of a Max Ernst painting; it was a Max Ernst that Max Ernst had never painted. Also Read: Dave Lee: Apple must make peace with developers for AI success Forgery is most effective when not just the artefact but the entire backstory has been carefully constructed to support its authenticity. Beltrachhi did this painstakingly, one artwork at a time. Today, criminals can automate this using AI. As a result, it is now possible to spin out thousands of plausible backstories in minutes, creating networks of corroborative 'evidence' that can then be deployed across multiple platforms simultaneously. This new technology that has made it possible to mass produce alternate realities has given birth to new forms of criminal enterprise that are proving to be extraordinarily hard to prevent. In December 2023, the BBC reported that an online news page called was actually a part of a coordinated opinion-influence operation that used AI to spin entirely fictional narratives about Ukrainian corruption. So successful was this deception that several of these stories were widely shared, eventually even by members of the US Congress. Also Read: AI, identity and drama: Why everyone's turning into a character Elsewhere, Global Village Space (allegedly a Pakistani news site) put out an article claiming that the psychiatrist of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had died by suicide and left behind a note that implicated the PM. This 'news' was picked up by the official state media in Iran and then began to circulate virally on social media channels till it got enough traction that it began to feature high up in internet search results. These AI-generated information assaults seek to insinuate propaganda into mainstream discourse in a way that it becomes so firmly entrenched as 'truth' in the public consciousness that it is almost impossible to dispute. This, in turn, allows bad actors to shape political narratives to suit their ends. Elsewhere, AI is being used to infiltrate corporate networks by constructing fake profiles of candidates who are just perfect for jobs that need to be performed remotely. In these instances, AI is used to generate an ideal resume—one that is perfectly suited for the given role. This includes AI-generated images of the person, purpose-built websites of his achievements and fake LinkedIn profiles. Once the candidate is shortlisted for a virtual interview, face-filter technology is used to make the person playing the role of the candidate match the images that were used to create the fake persona. Once recruited, these fake employees can penetrate the corporate network and conduct espionage, steal intellectual property or install malware. Also Read: Biases aren't useless: Let's cut AI some slack on these These sorts of deception operations are just the tip of the iceberg. As criminals better understand how digital technologies actually work, they are able to uncover new ways in which to conduct increasingly sophisticated crimes. When augmented by AI, these criminal activities can be carried out on an industrial scale and can result in tremendous financial losses. In September 2024, Michael Smith was arrested for orchestrating an elaborate scheme that allowed him to earn over $10 million in royalty payments from music streaming platforms that streamed songs he had created using AI. Instead of simply using AI to generate fake songs, he created fictional bands (with names like 'Caliente Bloom' and 'Calvinistic Dust') and created a streaming profile for all of them. He then created thousands of accounts on various streaming platforms and created an army of bots to continuously stream these songs he had created and pocketed the royalty income from each stream. Also Read: Friend or phone: AI chatbots could exploit us emotionally The reason this scheme went undetected was that Smith had taken care to deploy his bots in a way that did not arouse suspicion. Had he streamed a single song a billion times, it would have immediately raised red flags. Instead, he spread a billion fake streams over tens of thousands of different songs, making his scam much harder to detect. To do this, he turned to AI, creating up to a thousand songs a week that he spread over a range of different streaming services so that they could be fraudulently streamed. In the end, he managed to generate over 650,000 streams per day and collected annual royalties of over $1.2 million. Beltracchi's genius was in creating forgeries that not only looked real, but stood up to a rigorous investigation of their antecedents. In order to do that, he had to craft plausible histories for each of his counterfeits. Today's digital criminals can generate new realities on an industrial scale. Not only has this eroded our collective ability to distinguish fact from fiction, it has also spawned new genres of criminal enterprise that our law enforcement agencies are struggling to come to terms with. And this is only going to get worse. The author is a partner at Trilegal and the author of 'The Third Way: India's Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance'. His X handle is @matthan.
