The End of the Magic World's 50-Year Grudge

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/08/business/uri-geller-magic-deep-fakes.html
https://archive.ph/i7sEM

The End of the Magic World’s 50-Year Grudge
In 1973, Uri Geller claimed to bend metal with his mind on live television. Skeptics couldn’t beat him. Now they’ve joined him.
By David Segal
July 8, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

In 1973, a young man named Uri Geller appeared on one of the BBC’s most popular television shows, “The Dimbleby Talk-In,” and announced that the laws of Newtonian physics did not apply to him. Or that, at least, was the implication. A handsome 26-year-old Israeli, dressed casually and flanked by a pair of academics, Mr. Geller performed a series of bewildering feats using nothing more, he said, than his mind.

He restarted a stopped watch. He duplicated a drawing that had been sealed in an envelope. Then he appeared to bend a fork simply by staring at it.

“It’s cracking,” Mr. Geller said quietly, speaking over a tight shot of his right hand, which was gently rubbing the fork between his fingers. “It’s becoming like plastic.”

A few seconds later, the top of the fork fell off and hit the ground. By the time the applause of the studio audience died down, Gellermania had begun.

Mr. Geller became not just a global celebrity — a media darling who toured the world and filled auditoriums for dramatic demonstrations of cutlery abuse, with the humble spoon becoming his victim of choice — but also the living embodiment of the hope that there was something more, something science couldn’t explain. Because at the core of his performance was a claim of boggling audacity: that these were not tricks.

....

[marble falls]

1. Like PT Barnum: a good showman.

[Sibelius Fan]

2. Of course, they were tricks, and exposed as such decades ago.

Nothing wrong with magic tricks, but insisting the tricks weren’t tricks is something else.

[Brother Buzz]

4. Amateur magician, Johnny Carson shut him down

It helped that Carson consulted with Jame Randi for the impossible setup that left Uri Geller squirming and making lame excuses.

[Polybius]

9. Well, the spoon bent slightly

And none of the 3 (out of 10) tubes that he removed was the one that contained water.

[niyad]

3. Thank you. That was a most interesting article.

[Delphinus]

5. It was.

I must have missed that period when he was a sensation.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. NYT's sub-head "Skeptics couldn't beat him. Now they've joined him" seems like bullshit

(a) Skeptics showed it was just magic tricks. By that measure, they beat him in the 70s. If the NYT means "but the media continued giving him publicity as if it is more than a trick", then, yes, Geller led the media by the nose for decades.
(b) In what what have skeptics "joined him"? Are skeptics now also claimed paranormal powers? No.

[dalton99a]

7. +1. Geller is an asshole

James Randi, a Canadian magician and escape artist, known professionally as the Amazing Randi, went much further. A relative unknown at the time, Mr. Randi, who eventually won a MacArthur Fellowship as a professional skeptic, was the loudest anti-Geller voice in the world.

“He is intending to enter the ‘psychic healing’ field soon, and when he starts into that racket he can kill people,” he wrote in an edition of his book “The Truth About Uri Geller.” He also called Mr. Geller a “dangerous and insidious figure,” one he intended to stop “at all costs.”

Those costs, it turned out, were high. Mr. Geller filed defamation lawsuits against Mr. Randi, including one for claiming that Mr. Geller was performing tricks once taught on the back of cereal boxes. The so-called cornflakes case ended with a dismissal, but over the years Mr. Randi burned through most of his $272,000 MacArthur grant covering personal legal expenses. He died three years ago and apparently loathed his nemesis to the end. He once asked that someone throw his cremated ashes into Mr. Geller’s eyes, an obituary in The Economist stated.

[blogslug]

8. I'll give the man credit for his unique version of magic tricks but that's about it

[marybourg]

10. The real takeaway of this article is in the quote below:

”And now that fakery is routinely weaponized online, Mr. Geller’s claims to superpowers seem almost innocent.

I mean this in the most respectful way,” said Andy Nyman, a magician and actor who a few years ago introduced a lecture by Mr. Geller at the Blackpool Magic Convention, an appearance that cemented this truce. “I think the world is aware that if he’s fraudulent, there are bigger lies and bigger frauds out there that are far more damaging.”