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...
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...
Emerging Artists Exposed presents Dustin Pike reflecting on art as a means of personal growth, social awareness, and positive change. In this video interview, Pike discusses how creative practice can move beyond the gallery wall and become a way of shaping one’s environment, relationships, and sense of purpose.
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.
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.
Current AI, a nonprofit backed by public and philanthropic funding, is trying to build open AI infrastructure modeled on the early World Wide Web, TechCrunch reported on July 19th. The organization is working on tools and datasets for communities often left outside dominant AI systems, including an offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, projects for more than 50 African languages, digitized Arab cultural archives, and local AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities. Its leaders argue that public-interest AI should not depend on a handful of private companies deciding which languages, memories, and consent rules matter.
The public model begins with a different question from the commercial one. Big systems ask how many users can be reached, how much compute can be rented, and how quickly a product can scale. A community system asks who owns the data, who is allowed to stop the process, and whether a language can carry knowledge without being flattened into someone else's market expansion. The stakes are not only linguistic. A model that cannot hear a community cannot preserve its farming advice, medicine, stories, jokes, rituals, or warnings. Public AI will still need money, hardware, governance, and compromise. Its important gesture is simpler. It treats artificial intelligence less like a private app and more like infrastructure that should remember who it is supposed to serve.
Opponents of the rapid data center buildout staged 142 protests across 42 U.S. states on July 18th, Reuters reported. The coordinated effort targeted the infrastructure behind the AI boom, with organizers demanding transparency, resource safeguards, community benefits, and accountability from developers. The backlash crosses partisan lines. Reuters cited a June Reuters/Ipsos poll showing that only 14 percent of respondents would support an AI data center in their own community. Texas hosted the most events, followed by Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Indiana. Protesters cited water use, electricity pressure, noise, environmental health, and the feeling that communities are discovering these projects only after decisions have already moved forward.
The refused center gives artificial intelligence a local address. A model may arrive to the user as a clean answer in a box, but the machinery behind it needs substations, permits, cooling systems, land, water contracts, backup power, and neighbors who have to live beside the hum. The protest turns the cloud back into a building and asks who consented to its placement. That question is uncomfortable because the benefits and burdens do not appear in the same room. A company books compute capacity. A city promises jobs and tax revenue. A household sees the utility bill, the road traffic, the dry well, or the warehouse wall. AI infrastructure is no longer hidden behind product demos. It is becoming a political object with a fence around it.
