Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Legendary art critic Robert Hughes died Monday at age 74. It is a tremendous loss, not least because the former Time columnist counted among the few critics who could break through the practiced esoterism of the art world–all that cultish mystification that gets thrown over Great Works like a thousand-pound dung blanket–and make art matter to everyone. His best weapon? Anger. Raw, pungent, beautifully worded anger. And nowhere was this more evident than in his laser-eyed takedowns of the messy collision of art, celebrity, and money.

Here he is on Jeff Koons:

He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him.

On Julian Schnabel:

Schnabel’s work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting–a lurching display of oily pectorals.

On Alex Katz:

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

On Jean-Michel Basquiat:

Far from being the Charlie Parker of SoHo (as his promoters claimed) he became its Jessica Savitch.

Hughes’s rage wasn’t just nasty good fun (though there was definitely some of that). It was in service of a higher calling. Embedded in every dig at Damien Hirst’s talent and barb against Jeff Koons’s famewhoring was the notion that art is about more than pretty pictures; it’s a sort of cultural town hall where our values and mores all mingle. In Jean-Michel Basquiat: Requiem for a Featherweight, the essay from which the quote above is excerpted, Hughes lays Basquiat’s unimpressive career squarely at the feet of the “mania for instant reputation that so grotesquely afflicts American taste.” Here’s more:

It was a tale of a small untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of art-world promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, critics and, not least, himself. This was partly because Basquiat was black; the otherwise monochrome Late American Art Industry felt a need to refresh itself with a touch of the “primitive.” Far better black artists than Basquiat, such as the sculptor Martin Puryear, did not have to contend with this kind of boom-and-bust success. Its very nature forced Basquiat to repeat himself without a chance of development.

The sense you get from Hughes’s best writing is that something greater than fame and aesthetics is at stake. He brought moral outrage to art criticism, and in so doing he reminded you that art is something worthy of moral outrage.

Image: Ted Thai/Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images

NASA’s next-generation blended-wing-body aircraft completed its first flight today at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The X-48C is the latest in a series of designs from the Boeing/NASA partnership to explore the design, using a a large, delta-shaped fuselage rather than a traditional tube to boost efficiency. The new version, which, like the older version, is a scale model with a wingspan of about 20 feet, is designed to evaluate low-speed stability and a low-noise design.

The X-48C started life as the X-48B which made 92 flights between 2007 and 2010. The main changes were moving the winglets to the top of the fuselage next to the engines and extending the aft deck of the airplane. Both of these changes were part of the new design’s aim at reducing noise from the engines. And the number of engines on the X-48 has been reduced from three to two, each producing 89 pounds of thrust.

“We are thrilled to get back in the air to start collecting data in this low-noise configuration,” said X-48C project manager Heather Maliska in a statement.

A blended-wing-body design produces much of the lift needed for flight from the fuselage design, rather than the long wings typical of today’s airliners. Passengers would be seated in a larger open, triangular area that makes up the bulk of the main fuselage rather than the standard tubular fuselage used today. One of the interesting questions still being debated from a passenger point of view is how people would react to the unusual seating style, in particular the relative lack of windows compared to today’s jets.

The main driver behind the BWB design is fuel efficiency. Like a flying wing, the X-48 produces lift with the entire fuselage, without the drag associated with the long tubular design and tail surfaces of a conventional airplane. The small wings protruding from the fuselage on the X-48 and the vertical surfaces aid in stability and control. A pure flying wing like the B-2 bomber must give up some of its efficiency by using flight control surfaces and spoilers to provide control. The BWB design is just one of many ideas for a future, fuel efficient airliner, and very different than others using a thin, high-aspect-ratio wing.

It will likely be up to the marketplace to determine if and when a BWB design is economically viable and acceptable to the flying public. In the meantime, there is still plenty of engineering and flight testing needed, and not just at the potentially efficient cruise speeds. The challenges experienced at lower speeds during takeoff and landing are one of many hurdles NASA test pilots involved with the project told us during the X-48B flight testing.

In addition to gathering data on the noise produced from the new design that shields the engine with the fuselage and vertical control surfaces, the X-48C will continue to explore the lower end of the flight envelope, developing control laws for the airplane’s flight control systems. The NASA/Boeing team plan more flight testing this fall, including engine yaw control to use asymmetric thrust to move the nose of the airplane left and right.

The C model is expected to be the last of the remote control models of the BWB design, with the next version most likely being piloted by a person sitting in the cockpit.

After weeks of trying, I’d nearly found the real person behind a Twitter bot. It wasn’t the person who started the bot–chances are, that was just a computer program. Instead, I was hunting for the woman in the profile picture, the person whose identity had been stolen. The Internet is a big place; this isn’t easy to do. But I’d tracked the photo of a short-haired, punkish 20-something–used by @Arnitamj5, a bot calling itself Arnita Barayuga–to an abandoned MySpace profile of a Dallas woman named Elizabeth. She didn’t seem to have any other Internet presence, but I found one of her old MySpace friends on Facebook, figured out that he worked at a Dallas bike shop, and called it.

“So, listen,” I told him. “This will be the weirdest call you’ll get today.”

“Today?” he said.

“Probably all month.”

Then I explained: My goal was to draw a straight line from a Twitter bot to the real, live person whose face the bot had stolen. In the daily bot wars–the one Twitter fights every day, causing constant fluctuations in follower counts even as brands’ followers remain up to 48% bot–these women are the most visible and yet least acknowledged victims. And it’s almost always women, isn’t it? Bots are like a sorority party at 3 a.m.–a massive compilation of young, pretty faces who talk a lot of nonsense. But the women they portray are actual people, somewhere in this world. Who are they? And how were their photos dislodged from their original place?

This is a mostly pointless exercise, I knew: The story behind every photo would be different. And what would one of these women say–that she’s flattered to find her face spamming everyone on Twitter? Clearly, no. But it seemed worth doing, if only to tell one story, to have one answer. So I asked Elizabeth’s old friend: Did he still know her? He did, he said, though she’s since gotten married and changed her name. He promised to pass my message along. After four days of silence, though, I did more sleuthing and found her on Facebook under her married name. Then I emailed my plea: You’ve become a bot, Elizabeth. Can we talk about it?

Silence. Can’t say I blame her.

So I started over.

Bots are cheap. The company Buy Real Marketing will sell you 1,000 of them for $17, or 25,000 for $247–meaning the value of each is about a penny. And who’s buying them? Anyone. A brand’s social media manager will never admit to it, but chances are, gigantic companies have invested in this cheap form of image building. Why wouldn’t they?

Athletes definitely do it. A publicist for some major players–people at the top of their game–told me it’s common in his world. He once tried it himself, just to see what happens. He ordered the $17 package from Buy Real Marketing, via its website buytwitterfollowers.org. “They didn’t come in right away. I thought at first I’d been scammed,” he said. “But sure enough, within three days, they just poured in. It was exactly 1,000. To me, it shook the whole foundation. It made Twitter meaningless.”

The publicist gave me the names of a few people who also bought from Buy Real Marketing, and I dug into their followers. The bots were easy to spot–and these bots, no surprise, follow plenty of other celebrities and big brands. There’s no way to know if these were purchased follows or just pure coincidence, of course, but the list is wide-ranging. One bot from this batch followed Kelly Osbourne, former Formula 1 racer Tiago Monteiro, the Huffington Post, and an “Internet marketing consultant” named Trent Partridge, among 2,000 others.

If you click on a profile photo in Twitter, the photo will open in a tab of its own–and oftentimes will be larger, or more broadly cropped. I’d drag that onto my desktop, then run it through two image search engines: Tin Eye and Google Images. Each one scours the web for visual matches. After dozens of searches, a pattern emerged: Most bot photos had a long digital tail, having been posted on dozens of sketchy porn sites or blogs devoted to the barely legal. Occasionally, I’d be able to track a photo back to what seemed like an original source–like when a bot’s photo showed up alongside many others of the same woman, all posted to the fratboy site Barstool Sports. The site claimed her name is Aurora. But when I reached out, as was always the case, nobody cared to explain where the photos came from.

Then, finally, a reliable source: I tracked two bots back to the 2009 SUNshine Girls calendar, a lingerie showcase produced by the Toronto Sun. (I guess newspapers have to make money somehow.) The calendar only offered the models’ first names, and the paper’s photo editor wouldn’t connect me with them. But after a little Internet stalking–this is how reporting works, people!–I found a connection.

One of the bots, @Karriehga, which went by the name Maralyn Estes, showed a photo of a beautiful blond with dark eyes and hair poofed back like a Kentucky prom queen. This was Amanda the SUNshine Girl. And some clever Googling led me to a blog that included her full name. That allowed me to find her Facebook page, which didn’t list an email address, but did show that she recently clicked “like” on an events planning company. I figured that’s where she now works, so I called. Amanda, it turns out, was on maternity leave. “You can leave a message, and she’ll call you back in a few weeks,” her boss Darlene told me.

I didn’t have time for that, I said. Darlene asked why. So I began to explain.

“Wait, wait, Amanda was a SUNshine Girl?” Darlene yelped, and started laughing. “I didn’t know that!”

Oh, boy. Sorry Amanda.

But after that, Darlene said she’d help me get in touch. I hung up, relieved. Then I looked at my computer screen, which still had @Karriehga up. It had just tweeted something, as these things regularly do. Usually they’re just snippets of text yanked from websites, just something to keep their profiles active.

This time, though, the tweet seemed like a warning: “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.”

In the meantime, I contacted Buy Real Marketing. I expected this to be equally difficult, given the sketchy nature of what a company like this does. But its work is perfectly legal–in the name of viral marketing, big brands have done far worse–and so all I had to do was call a toll-free number and hit a few buttons. Then I reached a tired-sounding woman named Judy, who spoke to me on a scratchy phone connection. I identified myself as a reporter and asked to interview someone, but she volunteered herself for the task. So I asked her: Judy, who are the faces on your bots?

“These are not bots that we have on Twitter,” she said. “These are real people.”

Me: “So there are no bots?”

Judy: “No bots. Not even spam.”

Me: “I mean, I see a lot of what certainly look and function like bots. But they’re not bots?”

Judy: “They are real people. They just log in, like, once a month so they are considered active.”

Me: “I see. Are the profile faces them?”

Judy: “Yes, exactly.”

Me: “So, the pictures of the people who are on a…”

Judy: “Some of them are. We can’t really control them. These are real people, and they have their choice of freedom on what picture they place there.”

And that’s all she was giving me.

Amanda’s email showed up the next morning: “I heard you contacted my employer Darlene yesterday and would like to talk to me. I’m interested in knowing what this is all about.”

She gave me her number. I called immediately.

Amanda lives in Bowmanville, Ontario, just outside of Toronto. Her husband is a police officer there. The night before, as they puzzled over Darlene’s message to call me, her husband began telling Amanda about all the facial recognition software that’s becoming available to law enforcement. It freaked her out.

Truth be told, she’s been trying to distance herself from the SUNshine Girl thing. (We’re helping out by not publishing her last name. That’s one less Google result to worry about.) It’s not that she’s embarrassed; back in the day, she even did live promotions for the calendar. But these days she has to worry about what employers think. Darlene doesn’t care–thankfully–but Amanda used to work for the government. She figured it was best not to flaunt her past.

And now, this. In the past day, I’d found five other bots using the same photo of her.

“It’s kinda of creepy, to be honest with you. The whole thing,” she says. She’s on Twitter but rarely uses it, and had never heard of bots. “I’d like to find the source and tell them to stop using my photo, you know? Because you never know who’s going to see it, and I don’t have control over what someone’s saying. That could ruin who-knows-what.”

I told Amanda that she could report the bot as spam, and hope for the best. She said she’d do that, but that she likely wouldn’t do any more. After all, what’s there to do–sue? Sue who? She doesn’t even own the photo; it’s the Toronto Sun‘s property. But she appreciated knowing. She thanked me.

Four days later, Amanda’s bot @Karriehga was still live. It tweeted, “Let’s commit the perfect crime… I’ll steal your heart, and you steal mine.”

To say nothing of a face.

Guest point by Eric Schwartzman (@ericschwartzman) on why he believes the Social Media Policy at the 2012 London Olympics failed

First off, social media could have at least partially erased the advantage that some state-sponsored “full-time amateur athletes” from Eastern Bloc countries enjoy over self-financed amateurs from Western countries. But unfortunately the social media gag order by the IOC neutered that chance by restricting athletes from sharing posts that mention their sponsors on Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else online. Here’s the clause:

“Participants and other accredited persons are not permitted to promote any brand, product or service within a posting, blog or tweet…” [PDF]

Since state-funded athletes don’t need to raise money from private enterprise to support their Olympic bids, social media could have given those who do a way to rally funds.

The financial pressure on US Olympians is no joke. The parents of Gabby Douglas and Ryan Lochte both filed for bankruptcy recently, crushed under the immense financial sacrifice it took to get their children to the Olympic Games. Recognizing the contributions of their sponsors via social media might have offered some relief. But Rule 40 erased that possibility.

The Track & Field Athletes Association, Olympians and fans have been protesting the policy by including the hastags #rule40 and #WeDemandChange in their tweets. Above is an image Olympic medalist Dawn Harper tweeted to protest the gag order.

What’s backwards is the premise of the rule, which assumes that if athletes use social media to promote their own sponsors, official Olympic sponsors and rights holding broadcasters will lose. This is second reason the effort failed. It assumed that the media landscape is a zero sum game and that the absence of unofficial sponsors in social media would be a gain for official sponsors in mainstream media.

But as we seen, social media drives traffic to owned media, increasing the number of eyeballs broadcasters have to sell to paid media.

As veteran reporter Suzanne Vranica wrote in a story about the impact of social media on ratings:

“There have been plenty of negative hashtags assigned to NBC’s Olympics coverage on Twitter, including #NBCFail and #NBCStinks. But on Madison Avenue the hashtag for this Olympics so far is more like: #NBC$$$$.”

The take away is this. Social media doesn’t replace mainstream media. It drives mind share. More mind share equals more viewers. And more viewers means more value for official sponsors and broadcasters. What the IOC failed to appreciate is that tweets, blogs and mobile videos don’t cannibalize prime time viewership. They complement it.

To be fair, the IOC’s social media policy is certainly no anomaly. According to the National Labor Relations Board, most social media policies in the US are unlawful. Rule 40 is just one of many shortsighted gaffes that digitally illiterate gatekeepers from a bygone era have concocted to try and police the digital world by analog standards. Which brings me to the third, and final reason the social media policy at the London Olympics failed.

In the US, we enjoy freedom of speech. When organizations restrict that freedom they provoke real hate, and that hatred severely tarnish their brand. Social media policies govern personal expression and many regard personal expression as a natural right.

If organizations are seen as depriving individuals of what they consider to be their inalienable rights, such as the right to improve their working conditions or the right to bargain collectively, those same organizations are seen as unjust and their reputations suffer, which is the case for the IOC.

To sum it up, Rule 40 not only fumbled the chance to level the playing field for all Olympians, it skirted a ratings gain and stained the reputation of the International Olympic Organizing Committee. They protected themselves in the court of law and lost in the court of public opinion.

But it didn’t have to be a win-lose scenario. They could have had their cake and ate it too. If you’d like to learn how to develop practical, win-win social media guidelines by which your employees can conduct responsible, constructive social media engagement in both official and unofficial capacities, here’s a half price link good until the Closing Ceremonies for the first 50 sign-ups to take my online course on social media policy development.

I’ve never played Portal 2 (or the first), but I suspect some of you will find these timelines by designer Piotr Bugno interesting.

As a fan of Valve’s Portal 2 video game, I designed this infographic led by my curiosity to get a better grasp on its plot, on how mechanics informed the gameplay, and on the development of its main themes — good vs evil, descent vs ascent, destruction vs construction.

Seriously, all meaning is lost for me on these. Any Portal 2 fans care to chime in?