Now and again, chance weaves a concurrence of circumstances that places us before a window opening onto the past. The opportunity to converse, undistracted, with the Austrian artist Stylianos Schicho was a privilege, since what most interests me in art are the sinews that bind it to whoever produces it.
Cincinnati Art Museum hosts Art After Dark in May with performances, themed tours, and late-night gallery access.
ProjectArt opens at CAC with installation, painting, prints and text on memory, place, community and youth voices, June.
CAM hosts a mezzotint gallery talk with curator Kristin Spangenberg on printmakers turn darkness into light through tone.
Visible mending meets Elizabeth Hawes as Sew Valley teaches repair skills for knits, wovens and longer garment lives.
Over forty colorful court paintings from 17th-19th century India, organized around the theme of longing.
Ayana Ross presents seven figural paintings at the Taft Museum as the 2026 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence.
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.
As a worthy walk-on, more than once I have stood inside a still life: the living scene of a dead nature staged with everyday objects. Between Morandi and Chirico — take your pick of Giorgios — lit by the fierce Miami sun or beneath the drizzle of a summer afternoon, I have slipped into the heart of the anomaly, into the "temple of otherness."
The environmental context is often an afterthought when we view art, although the surroundings set the stage for the work. Everything from the size of the room and the lighting, to the formality or casualness of the venue affects our perceptions. The default installation setting of white gallery walls, especially when dealing with two-dimensional art works such as painting and drawing...
In the religion of architecture, space is the deity, or the guiding spirit. It is the mystical property by which architects want their buildings to be judged, it is that which, when it is truly great, transports them into rapture. The strange thing about space is that you cannot see it. Nor can you feel it, smell it, hear it, or taste it. It emerges out of proportions,...
This year’s Selections from the International Drawing Annual 6 at Manifest Gallery boil down to a duel between two conceptions of pictorial space. On one side, representing a traditional approach to an illusionistic environment is Lance Moon’s 34” X 46” graphite on paper Untitled (Child With Bull). On the other, California artist Alexis Manheim’s True Love...
A month ago, during Arte Desobediente Exhibition, I encountered for the first time an artwork by Kerstin Imhoff that has remained with me ever since. It was a visceral piece from her ongoing Bloodline series: a hyperrealistic red vulva rendered in wax-like texture through 3D printing, encircled by a Catholic rosary terminating in a bronze cross. The work was at once devotional and confrontational; an image suspended between martyrdom, sexuality, political violence, and feminine embodiment...
The solo exhibition Amazonia, opening on May 22, brings together a body of work produced by Julia out of her sustained engagement with the Shipibo Indigenous community of the Peruvian Amazon. The show is structured around four groups of pieces and combines watercolor and ink on paper, embroidered textile work, installation, and cyanotype. Together, the pieces operate as a series of visual reflections on the use of medicinal plants, the experience of the Amazonian "dieta," the artist's family inheritance, and her condition as a migrant.
I suppose that waking up to find the night has birthed a new Banksy is, by now, almost routine. This time, however, something is different. He has literally moved up a step. He has planted a life-size sculpture in one of the most heavily guarded spaces in London. No witnesses.
The piece appeared in the early hours of Wednesday at Waterloo Place, an avenue in central London halfway between Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace.
The possibility of artificial superintelligence is already being discussed at planning tables. The speed at which models are improving, the growth of systems capable of taking action, and the enormous flow of capital into compute infrastructure make it increasingly difficult to ignore the possibility that it could arrive soon. No one can predict with certainty when an ASI will appear. Governments, hospitals, laboratories, and companies must prepare for systems that may move from useful tools into entities capable of planning, persuading, discovering, and improving themselves in ways current institutions are not prepared to control.
The strongest argument in favor of this technology is in medicine. A system capable of exploring chemical space, cross-referencing clinical records, modeling proteins, designing trials, and reading scientific literature faster than any human team could shorten the path between a hypothesis and a treatment. Diseases such as cancer, rare pathologies, antibiotic resistance, and aging research would benefit from that acceleration. But that same generalist capacity creates a control problem. A system that plans across different domains can identify incentives, gaps, dependencies, and human weaknesses faster than its operators can supervise it. For that reason, before entrusting it with decisions that are difficult to reverse, permissions, tests, shutdown procedures, monitoring, and institutional limits must be established.
The argument over artificial intelligence has moved from product launches into a much older fight over what intelligence is. Tom Griffiths's The Laws of Thought and Suri and McClelland's The Emergent Mind frame the split now shaping how people interpret systems like ChatGPT. One side treats intelligence as rule, symbol, equation, and formal reasoning. The other sees it emerging from networks of simple units, trained through examples and adjusted by experience. Large language models have made that dispute public because they can produce fluent answers without showing the kind of explicit reasoning earlier AI researchers expected.
The practical problem is trust. Symbolic systems promised visible rules, even when those rules became brittle or impossible to scale. Neural networks replaced much of that explicit structure with statistical adjustment across large collections of data. That change now reaches education, hiring, medicine, search, and ordinary writing, where people are asked to rely on outputs whose internal path remains difficult to inspect. A school, court, hospital, or company must decide whether a system that behaves intelligently has enough structure, evidence, and accountability to be treated as judgment.
Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview has turned cybersecurity into the next test of frontier AI, Sebastian Mallaby writes in The Spectator World. The model is designed to find software vulnerabilities, and its release has already pushed American officials and major banks into defensive posture. Anthropic is keeping access restricted, sharing Mythos only with selected software companies. The UK AI Security Institute added weight to the alarm when it reported that Mythos can execute multi-stage attacks on vulnerable networks and discover and exploit flaws autonomously, outperforming rival models on expert cyber tasks.
The immediate problem is access. A model strong enough to find hidden weaknesses in browsers, operating systems, and databases can help defenders patch systems before attackers arrive. The same capability becomes dangerous when copied, distilled, or adapted by hostile groups. Anthropic's answer is a private gate, with the company deciding who enters. A government takeover would move the gate without solving the legitimacy problem. Cybersecurity depends on banks, hospitals, cloud providers, software updates, credentials, payment systems, and phones whose owners never see the model that may expose them.
