Designing the banknotes destined to circulate throughout a monetary area such as Europe is among the most prestigious and consequential commissions a professional or design studio can receive. Creating an image to be shared by millions of people, condensing an identity into visual form, and meeting complex demands of legibility, security, symbolism, and instant recognition constitute a task at which even a demigod like Hercules might have failed...
Cedric Michael Cox unveils Love Lives Here, a public mural in Wyoming celebrating community, belonging, and local pride.
Elizabeth Hawes closes August 2 in Cincinnati, showing 50 garments and original sketches by a radical American designer.
Rites of Passage spotlights nine emerging artists at Manifest, opening July 10 with student work from eight U.S. states.
Manifest Gallery opens VELVET, an international exhibition exploring black through painting, sculpture, and mixed media.
At Studio Kroner, Cedric Michael Cox leads a hands-on art workshop linking creativity, memory, grief, and inner healing.
Ai Weiwei's art leaves me with certain reservations. The public figure strikes me as overly polished, burnished almost to excess.
Some years ago he dropped an authentic Han dynasty urn onto the floor. Made sometime between 206 BC and AD 220, its first and only purpose was to shatter. He had bought it in Beijing in the early 1990s, during China's rapid urban expansion...
Call Me Ahmel
January arrived, and so did 2025. Halfway through the month it will pierce my head and my body in much the same way 2024 did—with hypersonic calm. Be careful. In Miami everything happens too fast, a good friend warned me, sounding more alarmed than concerned. Another good friend, one we have in common, calls him my fascist friend. Cuba, the way tango does to the men—and to the women—in Borges's magnificent story The Man on Pink Corner, has its own way with him.
“Hard Knocks: Art without Art School” is a loosely curated collection of more than one hundred works of art by thirty-one artists from around the globe. By making use of their three curators (visual artists Antonio Adams, Ran Barnaclo, & Spencer van der Zee,) Thunder-Sky’s Face Book page, and exhibition blog to cast a wide net for participating artists, they reached out...
Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) has been a crowd-pleaser for decades (except for the period following his death as a bankrupt until the 1950s). Popularly he is best known for his leaded glass or stained glass lamps, first marketed in 1899. But his stained-glass windows were the big money makers for the Tiffany Glass Company, incorporated in 1885, and renamed...
Tucked in the multi-page announcement of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s 2011-12 exhibition schedule is a portent of change beyond the new season. Re-installation of the Schmidlapp Gallery will be “the first step in the vision for a re-designed Cincinnati Art Museum.”
To find out what’s going on, in the Schmidlapp gallery now and the rest of the Museum later, we went directly to...
Although I am an avowed admirer of her solo work and have known her for nearly twenty-five years, I do not remember ever having spoken in person with Liudmila Velasco. About her work, about the weather, about how unbearable this or that artist can become. When I left the island, Liudmila was already practically an institution within Cuban women’s photography...
When we first came across Tim Harrier’s Shaman Spirit Guides, we dismissed them without mercy as the product of artificial intelligence. The mud-covered faces, the animals emerging from the background, and an unbroken frontal force produced, almost at once, a malignant suspicion. Suspicion ran far ahead of the work. And we are right to suspect almost everything in life. This series, no...
There is a book. Before the exhibition, before the charcoal drawings spread across the galleries of the Contemporary Arts Center, before the viewer crosses the blue thresholds into the dreamworld of Freeman Little...
Germany's financial regulator BaFin will begin overseeing how banks and insurers use artificial intelligence after lawmakers expanded its powers, Reuters reported on July 29th. The watchdog will monitor customer-facing chatbots, systems that assess creditworthiness, and practices that collect or analyze sensitive information. It will also be able to impose fines when AI disadvantages people or blocks fair access to financial services. A bank's automated judgment now arrives with a regulator assigned to inspect the machinery behind it.
Credit scoring turns private life into a financial surface. Income, illness, employment history, address, family circumstances, and past payments can enter a system that produces a decision without showing the applicant which detail carried the most weight. A chatbot may explain a product while another model quietly decides whether the person deserves it. BaFin's intervention places a legal right beside that hidden calculation, yet transparency will remain difficult when firms rely on complex systems and outsourced vendors. The applicant still stands at the counter with a file, a request, and no view of the score. A fine can punish discrimination after it happens. It cannot easily restore the loan, insurance, or opportunity that an opaque model already refused.
Amazon is winding down most of its flagship Nova AI models as it redirects resources toward a new frontier-model effort, Reuters reported on July 28th. The company has begun deprecating high-end Premier and Omni models along with its Reel video model and Canvas image model, while a new system led by researcher Pieter Abbeel is expected later this year. Amazon says it is evolving the lineup around customer needs. The discarded models leave a different record, one of expensive products losing their future before customers have finished learning their names.
Software companies have trained the public to treat updates as progress, with each replacement arriving as a cleaner version of the same promise. Model strategy makes the process visible as inventory management. A system receives a name, a launch, a place in a product family, and a period in which customers build workflows around its behavior. Then the company changes direction and asks those customers to carry the transition. The cost includes retraining, altered outputs, broken assumptions, and the quiet disappearance of a tool that once sounded strategic. Amazon's Nova portfolio becomes a shelf of provisional personalities. The frontier model can inherit the brand, but it also inherits the evidence that an AI product may be obsolete while its users are still adapting to it.
Publishers are beginning to treat books written by people as a premium product while generative AI makes cheap prose easier to produce, the Financial Times reported on July 27th. The paper describes a market in which some publishers see AI as a tool for authors and others imagine it replacing them. The distinction reaches the shelf. A reader buying a human-written book is paying for a named mind, a sustained voice, and the record of decisions that cannot be reduced to a prompt and a polished output.
The premium book turns authorship into a feature that can be advertised. For centuries, publishing has sold the work through a person's name, even when the labor behind that name included editors, translators, designers, printers, and booksellers. Generative systems disturb that chain by making fluent pages abundant and making their origin harder to see. A publisher can use software to accelerate research or revision, yet the reader still wants to know who carried the argument, chose the sentence, and remained answerable to the finished object. Human writing becomes expensive partly because the market has spent years treating language as an inexhaustible raw material. The price of the book may soon include a claim printed nowhere on its cover, that a person stayed with the manuscript from its first uncertainty to its final line.
