I will be honest guys, the Red portrait of king Charles is gorgeous asdfghjkl
it’s a bad portrait. Like. Objectively. It does the opposite of what’s intended. It looks like the painter is insulting him. If it was in a contemporary gallery with no context you would see it immediately as the ambivalent criticism of Charles’s reign, how he fades into the overwhelming red background as a tiny little figure, small and insignificant, insufficient for the clothes he’s wearing. It reminds my of Goya’s portraits, how they were so ‘realistic’ that they ended up making these great figures look pathetic to the viewer. So these are our rulers?
the sheer novelty. the surprise and shock, the kinda cunt it’s serving for no reason. I. I love it. It’s an incredible portrait by Jonathan Yeo. By the sheer fact that Charles, the man, is impossible to portray as greater than man because he’s just such a nothingburger of a dude. So a portrait made to make him look huge and interesting made him be swallowed in red brushstrokes. The butterfly, that reminded me immediately of “ we will all laugh at guilded butterflies”, draws more attention than him. It looks like an omen. It looks like a warning in all this red. Something is not right here.
This is the best royal portrait ever 10/10
This is a painting of a monarch whose individual personality and even bodily presence are a mere footnote within the legacy of bloodshed that built the throne he occupies. This is the only way it’s possible to depict him. It’s a photograph of his soul
And I think all of that is entirely deliberate!
I think Jonathan Yeo meant this portrait to be absolutely all of those things, he just can’t be very vocal about the paintings true meaning. Yet.
I’ve done this on another post, but let’s compare that portrait up there to some other portraits Yeo’s done.
Here’s actor and activist Idris Elba, whom colleagues have described as warm and friendly, open-hearted, with an emotional intelligence that makes him capable of being very honest and vulnerable with the character he’s playing:
Here’s Jony Ive - who founded Apple with Steve Jobs and was chief design officer responsible for some of the more popular artistic choices, who recently left the company because the culture had gotten so toxic and shitty. He now works more in private design, so he has more artistic freedom and he can be less in the public eye:
Yeo’s even previously painted British heads of state. Here’s the phenomenal Baroness Doreen Lawrence of the labour party, a Jamaican immigrant who turned the tragic murder of her son into a lifelong campaign of quietly and steadily dismantling systemic racism:
To me, all these portraits are deeply personal, conveying the sitter’s character with empathy and quiet dignity.
Elba is leaning forward in an intimate friendly gesture. He makes eye contact with the viewer but his face is turned slightly to the side, inviting but not confrontational, his brows slightly drawn together thoughtfully. His hands are natural and relaxed. He’s shirtless - not to be a beefcake thirst trap (okay maybe just a tiny little bit), but to convey how emotionally naked he’s willing to be.
Ives is literally putting a lens between himself and the viewer - we have to look closer to see his face, but when we do we see his eyes crinkled with a hint of good humor. The perspectives are all distorted, but the main thing we see is the hands that have physically built so much of the technology we use. And even outside the phone screen he’s still enased by a circular frame within a frame, indicating yet another layer of separation between the subject and the viewer.
Lawrence is radiant, proudly upright and implacable as a mountain, her head held high and her hands folded before her with a self-contained air of calm determination. And even though the background is a chaotic sea of looming shapes and quick brush strokes, her eyes keep us grounded, even pinned in place. We’re the viewer, but she is studying us.
And then, on the other end of the personality spectrum, here’s noted asshole Damien Hirst, who frequently makes the news for being racist and sexist and just generally a really slimy piece of shit. His most famous works are the animal carcasses suspended in resin-
-yeah, that. That guy. He’s made all the money in the goddamn world three times over for pieces like that, and he still seems like he’s on a personal mission to make everyone around him as miserable as possible.
Here’s Yeo’s portrait of him, seated on a leather throne, dick bulge at eye level, contained in one of his own tanks:
Here’s the droopy and melancholic portrait of the famously pompous and insufferable John Cooper Clarke, self-described “original punk poet”, who was recently booed off stage for making super transphobic remarks, and whose most famous quote is “I read Kerouac at 12 and decided I could do better”:
And, most notably for the argument I’m making here, here’s D-Day veteran Sgt Geoffrey Pattinson, and see if you can spot the extremely subtle use of color theory here:
My conclusion: Jonathan Yeo paints very good portraits, and sometimes his subjects are very bad people.
And I think he brings absolutely all of his artistic talent to the Charles portrait.
@chromegnomes is absolutely right; it is the only possible way to depict him. It is a photograph of his soul.
And that’s precisely why it’s so ugly and uncomfortable to look at.
People have said that Charles has a “complicated legacy”, which is what people say when someone has an objectively horrible legacy that they are still personally benefiting from. But the people who still tolerate his extravagant gilded existence to “honor historical tradition” will find absolutely nothing to like in this portrait. All the gold and brass and pomp of his uniform, all the military accolades for his colonial warmongering, all the fabulous ostentatious wealth he was born into and has spent every second of his life surrounded by - which would have been rendered with glittering precision and care in a traditional royal portrait - they’re all dingy and washed out and already fading. The medals aren’t even clearly marked enough to really know what they are; it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The butterfly that was included as a nod to his honestly extensive conservation work (because let’s give the little bit of credit where credit is actually due) stands out as the one bright point of beauty and authenticity - but it’s dwarfed by the only other visible object, the sword, and it’s being swallowed up by that lurid, putrid background that seems to seep out of Charles’ uniform. The dark tips of its wings are the most high-contrast part of the painting except for Charles’ black hollow eyes that stare into nothing. And, most significantly in my opinion, the butterfly isn’t actually touching him, or connected to him in any way. It just exists alongside him, but it doesn’t need him.
His face is painted in such a way to detail absolutely every wrinkle without ever being able to completely cover up the blood red background, and below the sunken shark-like eyes, the artist has included that vapidly pleasant plastered-on smile with nothing behind it that is practically the royal uniform by now. I think the angle is also deliberately chosen to be unsettling: many portraits are traditionally done either head-on, ¾ profile, or full profile. Charles is none of these - his head is tilted juuust a few degrees off kilter. It’s not quite right. And he’s looking off to the side very slightly; his thousand-yard-stare is kind of drifting over the viewers shoulder. He can’t look us in the eye.
And there is no way, there is absolutely no possible way that an artist who is smart enough and skilled enough to imbue all his other portraits with so much meaning and symbolism and indicators of the subject’s character - there’s no way that’s not intentional.
But… Yeo lives in London. He’s still working on other royal and aristocratic portraits. He still has to live in that society, and he still has to get paid.
So of course he has to toe the line, at least until Charles dies, and say that the vivid blood-soaked red is to symbolize the “”“vibrancy”“” of this terminally ill octogenarian, to bring a “”“modern contemporary feel”“” to this 19th century colonizer.
The king saw the painting when it was about halfway done. Yeo tells BBC News’ Katie Razzall that Charles was “mildly surprised by the strong color, but otherwise he seemed to be smiling approvingly.” He adds that when Camilla saw the portrait, she said, “Yes, you’ve got him.”
Listen, I work in memory care and end-of-life care, and we only say someone “seems to be smiling approvingly” to comfort the family when someone is so far gone they clearly don’t know where they are anymore. His ex-wife Camilla, who probably has more good reasons to hate him than any other single human being alive, looked at this haunting vision of hell and was like YES PERFECT.
This is all completely intentional. We are all picking up on exactly the message the artist was trying to convey. Yeo is trying to tell us, loud and clear, that something is not right here. It is absolutely an omen.
Op is right; it is insulting him. And it is supposed to make us look at this pathetic villain, who is currently toddling through the final days of his unfairly long and lavishly useless life, and think “these are our rulers?”
EDIT: I can’t believe I got something so obvious so colossally wrong, but Camilla’s not his ex-wife, they are very much married. Thank you everybody who corrected me, and if you’ve reblogged the old version of this where I stick my foot in my mouth up to the knee, could you please reblog this version?
Wikipedia editors push offensive language to delegitimize some Native American Tribes
Article Text As Follows:
Wikipedia editors push offensive language to delegitimize some Native American Tribes
By Sherry Robinson
Special to The Independent
ALBUQUERQUE — When Lily Gladstone won a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination for her role in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the public recognized a Native American actress. But to Wikipedia readers, she is an American actress whose father was Blackfeet and Nez Perce and whose mother was white.
Three long-time editors at the online encyclopedia argued that even though Gladstone grew up on the Blackfeet reservation, she couldn’t be called Native American unless she was an enrolled member of the tribe. When Gladstone’s uncle weighed in to say she was enrolled, they dismissed his comments. She is still, in Wikipedia’s view, “an American actress.”
In recent years, outside of a national debate in Indian Country over fake tribes, a handful of Wikipedia editors have been deciding who is Native American and who isn’t.
Look behind the curtain of the sprawling site and you will find a network of 265,000 volunteer editors writing and editing within a Wiki universe that has its own rules, language, police and courts but no traditional hierarchy.
Wikipedia’s structure allows likeminded editors to work together, but it also permits editors with a bias to advance their agenda. The site has drawn criticism from media and academics for slanted articles on Blacks and Jews. Wikipedia documents its own systemic bias in an article by that name and attributes the problem to too few minority editors. The typical editor, it says, is a white male.
By Wikipedia’s definition, the only real tribes are federally recognized; editors of Native American material denigrate state-recognized and unrecognized tribes and seem preoccupied with revealing fake Indians.
The fakes are out there, and they’re a problem. But there’s a big difference between people who invented a Native ancestry and people who have a long, documented heritage.
For this story, aggrieved tribal members didn’t identify themselves because they fear the site’s size and power – it reaches 1.8 billion devices a month – and some editors’ vindictiveness.
Behind the curtain
Wikipedia is transparent about its process. Click on “talk” at the top of each article and you find the (sometimes endless) debates among editors about an article and see the site’s rules in action.
Editors are anonymous because the Wikipedia Foundation has a strong commitment to privacy, says a spokesperson. However, readers don’t know what expertise editors have or whether they’re Native American.
Editors select their subject matter. With experience they can rise in the pecking order until they gain authority to reverse or eliminate the edits of others. They quote the site’s often arcane rules in Wiki-Speak to anyone who disagrees. While Wikipedia espouses objectivity, neutrality and civility, discussions can take the low road.
On Lily Gladstone’s talk page, a newish editor, user name Tsideh (Apache for bird), asked, “What are your sources supporting the idea that Native Americans are only those who are enrolled in a US recognized tribe?”
A Wiki editor, user name ARoseWolf, answered: “A notable subject can make a claim… but you must have that respective tribal nation’s acceptance as verification through enrollment.“
Gladstone’s uncle wrote: “I’m a primary source for Ms. Gladstone’s tribal heritage. Her father is my brother. Through our father, we are both enrolled in the Blackfeet Tribe in the USA,” he wrote. “Our mother is enrolled Nez Perce. So Ms. Gladstone is a direct descendant of both Blackfeet and Nez Perce.”
ARoseWolf shot him down. “We can not use primary sources to verify such information and, you, as a claimed family member have a WP:COI which means we need an independent source.”
WP:COI is the Wikipedia rule on confl ict of interest. Wikipedia forbids primary sources, and yet they’re the gold standard for journalists and academics.
Tsideh challenged the position that only enrollment in a recognized tribe “entitles somebody to claim to be a Native American” as an unfounded, minority point of view that Wiki editors didn’t support with a citation or explanation.
ARoseWolf and others chastised Tsideh for violating Wiki rules on bullying, false accusations and arguing Wiki policy. Tsideh countered that Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t have to prove he was an Italian American, but Lily Gladstone had to prove she was a Native American.
As the back and forth continued, ARoseWolf slammed a new editor who "just happened to find this discussion,” a dig that implies one party enlisted another to join the debate. That too is a Wiki violation.
Bohemian Baltimore, another regular, insisted, “If she’s not enrolled, she may be a descendant, but she’s not a Native American.”
Who is Native American?
Terry Campbell, a Navajo born in Tuba City, Arizona, who lives out of state, has been studying Wikipedia for five months, after friends complained about poor treatment in trying to edit Wiki pages.
One friend wanted to add some facts to an article about a tribe. “These changes were rejected by a handful of editors who cited other Wikipedia pages as sources,” he said, “and I thought that was very, very odd.”
A friend citing sources that prove her tribe survived the Indian wars and received state recognition ran up against Wikipedia guidelines on determining Native American identities that were largely crafted by two editors, user names CorbieVreccan and Yuchitown. Wiki editors used the guidelines to reclassify dozens of state-recognized tribes as “heritage organizations” and removed “Native American” from biographies of prominent tribal members or, worse, called them a "self-identified Native American.”
The implication, Campbell explained, is that the tribe no longer exists and that its members are suspect or even “Pretendians.” Wikipedia has a page for that too.
The same group has shaped many articles on Native subjects. Campbell said he combed through references and found they were misrepresented, taken out of context, sourced from far-right academics, or unreliable.
“The scope of this issue is huge,” Campbell said. “It permeates all the Native articles I checked.”
Campbell recognized talking points from what he called a far-right movement in Indian Country intent on erasing state-recognized and unrecognized tribes. (New Mexico has no state-recognized tribes and six unrecognized groups or tribes.)
Some Native Americans and Anglos, he said, believe that Indigenous people outside the circle of federal recognition should be considered non-Native. They also want to prevent members of the disenfranchised groups from selling their art, receiving ancestral remains, accessing disaster relief or re-establishing their homeland.
Outside Indian Country, it’s not generally known that U.S. Indigenous groups live within a caste system based on government recognition, with 574 federally recognized tribes on top, dozens of state-recognized tribes second, and several hundred unrecognized tribes last.
In 2021, Yuchitown wrote, “The overwhelming majority of ‘List of unrecognized tribes in the United States’ are completely illegitimate.”
There are many reasons why groups aren’t recognized. Some avoided the reservation. Some lost their recognition during the termination era. Some were broken up and scattered during the Indian Wars. Some went underground, practicing their culture secretly while passing as Hispanic. Many simply stayed put.
When Wikipedia editors claim that “Native American” is a political status conferred by the U.S. government, that an individual can only be called a “descendent” until their tribe is recognized, they push this narrative, Campbell said. It’s a contradiction of federal Indian law and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, “As a general principle, an Indian is a person who is of some degree Indian blood and is recognized as an Indian by a Tribe and/or the United States. No single federal or tribal criterion establishes a person’s identity as an Indian. Government agencies use differing criteria to determine eligibility for programs and services. Tribes also have varying eligibility criteria for membership.”
Extreme points of view
Campbell has contributed to a lengthy report, as yet unpublished, that identifies biased editors. They include Yuchitown, CorbieVreccan, ARoseWolf, Indigenous girl and Bohemian Baltimore.
“It was like a tree with many interconnecting branches that had been created over time by the same small group of people pushing extreme points of view,” Campbell said.
Initially the group made changes slowly, he said, “but they started pursuing their agenda aggressively after November, when state-recognized tribes retained their voting rights in the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI). Essentially, after the movement to delegitimize state-recognized tribes failed officially, the key players doubled down on altering and controlling the flow of information about Native Americans through Wikipedia.”
Campbell observed widespread violations of Wikipedia standards: “I found evidence that they blatantly misquoted and misrepresented sources to push extremist political beliefs; teamed up to manipulate the consensus system by voting in blocks; exploited Wikipedia rules, such as conflict of interest, to block outside editors from making changes to Native-related pages; excessively cited opinion pieces from fringe political figures, including those accused of racism and anti-semitism; blocked the use of legitimate primary and secondary sources that contradict their extremists beliefs, which violates Wikipedia’s rule against information suppression; posted originally researched, politically motivated essays instead of well-sourced articles; and harassed and defamed Native American tribes and living Native American people.”
Reacting in February to an early draft of the report posted on Google, the editors were incensed that anybody would voice complaints “off-Wiki.” ARoseWolf wrote that “we have been attacked, threatened with legal action and had misinformation/ false claims spread against us.” She and Yuchitown denied being part of a conspiracy against tribes or organizations and said they were just following Wiki rules. Yuchitown accused critics of being “meat puppets” of a person who objected to some Native content and enlisted others to back them up. In WikiSpeak this is meat puppetry.
“Volunteers on Wikipedia vigilantly defend against information that does not meet the site’s requirements,” the Wikipedia spokeswoman wrote. “These volunteers regularly review a feed of real-time edits to quickly address problematic changes; bots spot and revert many common forms of negative behavior on the site; and volunteer administrators (trusted Wikipedia volunteers with advanced permissions to protect Wikipedia) further investigate and address negative behavior. When a user repeatedly violates Wikipedia policies, Wikipedia administrators can take disciplinary action and block them from further editing.”
Inaccurate and insulting
In 2006, Wikipedia established the WikiProject Indigenous Peoples of North America to improve its Native-related content of 14,000 articles and more than 37,000 pages.
Recently, a hot topic on the project’s talk page was a proposal to change a category name from “unrecognized tribes” to “organizations that self-identify.”
On April 15 Melissa Harding Ferretti, chairwoman of the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts, wrote, “The proposed renaming of the category on Wikipedia is not only inaccurate… but also insulting.”
Ferretti is one of the few Natives to take on Wiki editors openly.
Herring Pond was originally listed with other Wampanoag tribes. In 2022 Yuchitown stripped “state-recognized” from the page, even though the state Commission of Indian Affairs regularly engages with them. Last year Yuchitown created a separate page for Herring Pond. Wiki editors resisted attempts to make changes or corrections.
After Wikipedia called Herring Pond a “cultural heritage group” and a nonprofi t that “claims” to descend from Wampanoags, Ferretti wrote in a Wiki discussion, “There is no claim, it’s a fact! Might I add, nonprofit status was imposed upon Tribal nations in the ‘90s because we didn’t have our federal recognition yet.”
Her tribe has a well-documented history. “We still have care and custody of our sacred places, burial grounds and our 1838 Meetinghouse, one of three built for the Tribe after the arrival of the colonizers. Our continuous presence and stewardship of these lands are recognized by historical records, deeds and treaties.”
Ferretti wrote that tribes without federal recognition already face significant hurdles to gain recognition, “and being labeled as ‘self-identified’ can add to these challenges by casting doubt on our legitimacy.” Mislabeling unrecognized tribes “can lead to the spread of hate, misinformation and further marginalization.”
Some Wiki editors agreed. One wrote that “there are strong negative connotations to saying someone who is Native 'self identifies,’ because the inference is that they are Native in name only or falsely claiming to be Native. A change like this will impact countless articles…” Bohemian Baltimore, ARoseWolf and Yuchitown insisted there were no negative connotations. They opposed calling an unrecognized group a tribe because it legitimized groups with unverified claims. ARoseWolf said, “If they had proof of their connection to the original people they would have gotten federal recognition.”
This is a frequent refrain among the insiders, who apparently think the application process is a slam dunk instead of the long, difficult, expensive journey it is.
Yuchitown noted that “all of the editors who actively contribute to and improve Native American topics on Wikipedia have voted to support the renaming.” It’s a remarkable declaration that he and his allies act in concert.
The insiders took even stronger action against Lipan Apaches in Texas.
Late in 2022, Yuchitown changed the entry of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas to say that NCAI recognizes the tribe as state-recognized but the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) does not. In fact, NCSL took down its web page listing federal and state-recognized tribes because it couldn’t verify the accuracy.
In boilerplate that appears on all the Texas unrecognized tribes’ websites, Yuchitown said Texas has no legal mechanism to recognize tribes, citing an online article that in turn cites the discredited NCSL web page.
In 2022, a tribal member and Yuchitown fought back and forth, reversing each other’s edits. In WikiSpeak, it was edit warring. The tribal member informed Yuchitown that the NCSL page he quoted no longer existed. CorbieVreccan told the member she was up against “two experienced editors,” and Yuchitown accused her of conflict of interest and edit warring. His fellow travelers demanded to know if she had an official position with the tribe. She didn’t.
ARoseWolf wrote, “As Wikipedia is not a state or government-controlled entity it can make up its own rules for what content is allowed on its platform.”
Getting personal
On Dec. 16 the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas and the Lipan Apache Band of Texas got their own pages, courtesy of Yuchitown, who called them "self-identifying” nonprofits. Like the Herring Pond Wampanoags, they couldn’t make changes or corrections.
Next Yuchitown created a new category called “American people who self-identify as being of Lipan Apache descent.” It had a list of four people. The introduction said they “claim to have Lipan Apache ancestry but have no proof of this heritage. In some cases, they make the claim despite having been proven to have no Lipan Apache heritage at all.” At the top of the page is a link to “Pretendian.”
“This category is libelous,” wrote a member of the tribe. “No evidence has been provided that the people of the Tribe or the Band have no proof of this heritage” other than Wikipedia’s list page. She demanded the category be deleted.
An editor outside of Yuchitown’s circle agreed. “Why have a page for one tribal organization with evidently malicious or maligned intent? Are we going to create a page for every single Native person who identifies as a Native of any kind? Weird, weird category that is out of place on Wikipedia,” the editor wrote.
Yuchitown, backed up by Bohemian Baltimore and Indigenous girl, argued there was nothing libelous. They got the tribal member blocked for “sock puppetry,” or using more than one account. The category remained.
In January, Bohemian Baltimore doubled down, making a page for each person on the list.
The Wikimedia spokeswoman says that in some extreme cases the foundation relies on a trust and safety team that will investigate and may also take action.
Campbell wrote in the report that many Native American communities and people “have been targeted by the small group of propagandists in this complaint… And the thousands of people who make these communities have been slandered and assaulted on Wikipedia through the actions of these propagandists.”
please get a VPztfN — Russian authorities may block Wikipedia (and possibly other websites) to prevent you from being informed about the war in Ukraine.
[ID: Two screenshots from different sites. The first says, “remember that you can’t save everyone.” The second, “Remember that you have to try.” End ID]
Isn’t it suspicious that the sexiest man alive is always already a celebrity? I feel like they’re really not plumbing the depths in their research.
Like, imagine if you got the Sexiest Man Alive edition of People and your orthodontist was on the front cover and you were like, “Oh PHEW, I guess I’m not the only one who sees it.”
