我怀疑即使Netflix期望”Is It Cake?“这样a hit。
The premise, if you haven’t already binged the TV series, involves professional bakers trying to fool judges by creating cakes that don’t look like dessert but instead appear to be everyday commodities –钱包,玩具,fast food。
A show like “Is It Cake?” offers a safe way for viewers to test their capacity to spot a fake. This may seem like a stretch; cake and conspiracy are hardly the same thing.
Yet as an art historian who researches视觉欺骗的历史, I’ve noticed that throughout American history, moments of social anxiety around truth tend to be accompanied by similar “fool the eye” pop culture phenomena, fromP.T. Barnum’s hoaxes到一种称为“trompe l’oeil。”
Guessing games
在19世纪的最后几十年中，当艺术界迷上了梵高和马蒂斯（Van Gogh）和马蒂斯（Matisse）的同时，中产阶级的美国人痴迷于trompe l'oeil绘画 - 超现实主义的静物生命，这些静物具有生命大小的日常物品。他们看上去是如此真实，据报道人们试图从墙上抓住涂漆的小提琴和美元钞票。
即使那些容易怀疑的人也可能成为受害者，因为这些绘画是没有框架和在非典型环境中like pubs, shop windows and hotel lobbies. In these quintessential urban public spaces, the act of being fooled became a collective social experience, much as it is on “Is It Cake?” Not only are viewers taking pleasure in the failure of the on-screen judges, but the judges themselves must also reach a collective verdict after 20 seconds of debate.
One particular1890邮票绘画is remarkably reminiscent of a bit called “Cash or Cake” that closes out each episode of “Is It Cake?” The painting, by Jefferson Chalfant, unassumingly features two Lincoln stamps side by side, one painted, the other real. Below them, a painted news clipping invites viewers to decide which is which.
Self-conscious humor was also central to trompe l’oeil. Rather than signing their names as artists are apt to do, trompe l’oeil painters often painted their own photographs or letters addressed to their studio into their still lifes as an inside joke.
另一位，约翰·哈伯尔（John Haberle）的一幅画作由一群专家进行了检查，他们观察了它在镜头下，甚至擦掉一些油漆。
This investigative penchant explains the curious genealogy of “Is It Cake?” The show traces its roots to a series of病毒Instagram视频从2020年开始，在他们的结局时刻以幻觉蛋糕为特色。
Most viral videos don’t become television series, but this one has because the esoteric process of creating the illusion equally fascinates, even if viewers have no fondant-focused aspirations.
A sugary allegory
Trompe l’oeil is an ancient art form, but it exploded in the United States, and nowhere else, in the 19th century becausedeception was a new and particularly American problem。
Cities and industries were growing more rapidly than ever before, and many Americans moving from rural areas faced urban anonymity for the first time. Cities were rife with crooked opportunists, fromcon artists to counterfeiters–the Anna Delveys and Tinder Swindlers of their day。信任是一个棘手的事情。
在这个环境中，Trompe l'Oeil具有社交功能。它为美国人提供了以可管理和愉悦的方式测试他们的洞察力的渠道。
因此，我对“是蛋糕吗？”这样的节目的引力并不感到惊讶。正在发生在more ominous deceptions lurk in the media landscape。There are even moments when the show veers in darkly suggestive directions. In one episode, the bakers collectively try to educate host Mikey Day by teaching him the term “tiltscape,” which, they explain, has to do with the balance and weight distribution of baked goods. After Day uses the word in his appraisal of the contestants’ work, they later reveal that the term was a hoax all along – a sugary allegory for socially fueled misinformation.
At a time when we often don’t know if what we encounter on our screens can be trusted, it feels good to alleviate those anxieties with a show in which the only consequence of being fooled is cutting into a shoe that we assumed was a cake.
Maggie Cao, David G. Frey Assistant Professor of Art History,University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill。本文从对话在创意共享许可下。阅读original article。
