Did Google Arts & Culture break all records on the Play Store, a racist app?

Google has been offering the Arts & Culture app on the Android Play Store since 2016. This excellent app is a real mine of information about art history and artists of all time. The user can freely explore an amazing catalog of artworks classified by style, period or even color. But as of January 2018, the app had only very moderate success. It is very well known: art and culture are not what pleases the biggest crowds these days.

But since January 2018, the app offers a new feature based on Google’s facial recognition technology. This feature allows users to find artwork that looks like their selfie. What’s on offer for a good slice of fun between friends. Unfortunately, this feature is not available in our country due to very strict European laws regarding facial recognition technologies. In the United States, on the other hand, the app went completely viral within a few days and topped the download charts on the Android Play Store and iOS App Store.

Google Arts & Culture can find artworks that look like you, but only if you’re white

But this success is accompanied by a lively debate. Like Google Photos, which associates black people with gorillas, Google Arts & Culture has been accused of racism. If the app manages to find very similar portraits for whites, it’s clear that this doesn’t apply to others.

Instead of finding a similar portrait, the app will automatically people of color to images representing a person of the same color, as if limited to that. For example, an Asian woman will automatically match a portrait of a Chinese woman even if there is no other physical similarity between them. Not very flattering for concerned users. However, the problem may stem directly from the majority of works of European art brought together by practice. This is because European painters mostly paint white people, which limits the choice of people of other colors.

Not a terrible comparison #GoogleArts pic.twitter.com/dm9VuxO4GC

— Brice Burge (@THATBriceBurge) January 15, 2018

Google arts and culture selfie feature reminds how little Asian representation has been in art history pic.twitter.com/pmfQsZ7xf2

– nydthakid (@nydiahartono) January 11, 2018