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...
Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored pumpkin room turns reflection, repetition and glowing color into an endless Cincinnati encounter
Ayana Ross presents seven figural paintings at the Taft Museum as the 2026 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence.
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.
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.
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...
In the late1950s and into the 1960s, the philosophies of composer John Cage permeated the arts. Allan Kaprow took Cage’s notion of incorporating all of life into (and as) music and invented the “happening,” where the human body took over as the artist’s medium, the environment the “canvas,” and the spontaneity of actions and occurrences surrogated the artist’s autonomy and hierarchy...
It might seem flip to start a review of “Treeline,” Kent Krugh’s (American, 1955- ) rather magnificent exhibition of 22 black-and-white photographs* of the Angel Tree, the largest tree east of the Mississippi, with the old chestnut that “you can’t the see the forest for the trees.” But in this case, the Quercus virginiana, an evergreen oak tree AKA southern live...
In Cincinnati painting circles two names, from a recent past, keep their magic. The late Paul Chidlaw and the late Jack Meanwell, both of whom painted with a flashing style raised from the canvas in waves of impasto excitement. Both artists’ works are available at Mary Ran Gallery, but it’s Jack Meanwell who’s currently in the gallery spotlight. Thousands of pieces of Meanwell’s arework on hand...
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...
A few months ago I wondered in these pages what Macron was getting out of lending the Bayeux Tapestry to the English. Forty thousand French citizens signed a petition to block it, citing textile fragility and, I suspect, a touch of cross-Channel rancour as well. The other question remained: what would the British Museum get out of it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent diplomats a cable telling them to push back against foreign talk of a "kill switch" in American technology, Reuters reported on July 22nd. The July 16 cable followed Washington's brief decision to block non-U.S. residents from Anthropic's most advanced AI models, Fable and Mythos. That June restriction led Anthropic to suspend the models globally before the ban was lifted later in the month. The cable urged U.S. envoys to sell American AI products abroad, contest digital sovereignty efforts, and describe attempts to build rival sovereign AI systems from the ground up as wasteful. It also called fears of a government magic button an exaggerated reading of export controls and cybersecurity review.
The kill switch is a diplomatic problem before it is a technical feature. Foreign governments do not need to find a literal button to fear dependency. They need only watch an API, a model license, a cloud account, or a compliance order become unavailable by political decision. Rubio's cable tries to replace that image with reassurance, but the sales pitch carries its own admission. American AI now arrives as infrastructure tied to export control, cybersecurity review, sanctions culture, and the authority of a state that can pressure companies with little warning. Europe hears an offer of secure supply chains and hears a condition attached to every login. The next argument over sovereign AI will happen in procurement forms, cloud contracts, residency clauses, and backup plans written by governments that no longer trust uninterrupted access.
The United States and China are preparing AI talks for September, Reuters reported on July 21st, citing five people familiar with the matter. The meeting would be the first official AI dialogue between the two governments under President Donald Trump and is expected to follow from the May Trump-Xi summit. Sources told Reuters that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would lead the U.S. side, while the agenda, participants, location, and dates remain under discussion. Both governments are weighing risks from frontier models, including military use, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, labor disruption, intellectual property, and export controls.
The September model turns artificial intelligence into diplomatic material. A frontier system no longer appears only as a product, a lab asset, or a platform feature. It becomes something rival states must name before they can restrain it. The first task may sound procedural: define what counts as a frontier model, who controls release, how open-weight systems travel, and which uses belong outside the market. That vocabulary matters because power often enters policy through definitions. A model trained in one country can shape weapons research, propaganda, code, surveillance, and industrial advantage in another. The table will not solve the rivalry. It will decide which parts of the machine can be discussed before they become incidents.
YouTube has clarified its monetization rules for AI-generated and low-quality videos, TechCrunch reported on July 20th. The platform now divides inauthentic content into three categories that can lose access to the YouTube Partner Program: generic, repetitive, or template-based videos; off-putting or emotionally manipulative videos; and content where AI personas discuss sensitive topics such as health, finance, legal issues, or medical advice. YouTube says the update is meant to discourage content farming while still allowing creators to use AI when it adds originality and craft.
The slop rule turns synthetic abundance into an accounting problem. AI can produce endless thumbnails, scripts, voices, rescues, tutorials, reactions, and fake experts, but a platform does not want every cheap video to become an ad surface. The boundary is not simply between human and machine. It is between work that carries intention and work that treats attention as something to be harvested with minimum friction. Monetization gives the rule its force. A video may remain online, but the money can be cut off when automation becomes too generic, too manipulative, or too eager to borrow authority from a synthetic face. The platform helped build the incentive machine. Now it is trying to decide which machine-made pieces are still worth paying.
