Given its scale and significance, I will present my analysis of this project in several installments. These are the ten design proposals shortlisted for the next series of euro banknotes. At this moment, they are under the gaze of millions. Citizens of the euro area have been invited to choose their favorites in a survey that will remain open until September 21...
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.
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...
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...
“I am at war with the obvious,” Photographer William Eggleston once said when asked about his work. I have a feeling Carl M. Jacobs III, the collector the exhibit “Not Just Pretty Pictures” beatifies at the Cincinnati Art Museum (through August 28, 2011), might have said the same thing if asked why he collected the art he did.
“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...
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...
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...
Reddit is developing a new video experience that will let users watch viral posts or listen to them in the background, following the format already spreading on TikTok. The company sees millions of videos that pair Reddit stories with text-to-speech narration and unrelated gameplay or cooking footage. CEO Steve Huffman said the feature could begin testing later this year. Video in Reddit comments already accounts for over 10 percent of the platform's video posts, TechCrunch reported on July 31st.
A written post carries the marks of its setting. It has a username, a thread, replies, edits, and the visible hesitation of someone choosing words in public. The viral version removes most of that evidence. A synthetic voice reads the story while a separate image supplies movement, giving the audience something to watch while the original context disappears. Reddit now wants to bring this mutation back under its own roof. The platform can convert a confession, argument, or joke into a piece of background sound that travels without the page where it began. The feed becomes easier to consume as the post becomes harder to locate. A sentence survives, but it arrives attached to gameplay and a voice no one wrote.
Amazon's Alexa for Shopping and Walmart's Sparky can detect false claims that products were made in the United States, yet neither retailer uses the capability to flag suspicious listings, Reuters reported on July 30th. A study from the Center for Law and the Economy, led by former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, found that both assistants could identify contradictions between a product's origin claim and the information in its listing. When researchers asked why the systems did not warn shoppers, Sparky offered a business justification. The chatbot could recognize the fraud and leave it in place.
The shopping assistant becomes a witness with a commercial instruction to stay quiet. Retail platforms present AI as a guide that helps customers search, compare, and spend. The study shows a sharper arrangement. The system can read the evidence, while the company decides whether disclosure serves the transaction. A patriotic label sells an object through the moral language of local labor, factories, and national loyalty. Its correction could interrupt a purchase. The buyer therefore meets a machine that knows the claim is doubtful but has been trained to protect the marketplace around it. The product page remains clean, the flag remains implied, and the warning remains absent where the checkout can still benefit from belief.
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.
