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...
Final-Friday CAC @ 21c pairs a hotel gallery visit with CAC exhibitions in one free guided hour Cincy June 26 at 5:30p.
CAM's Pride night brings music, art making and free late-hour access to Eden Park on June 26 for Art After Dark in Ohio.
Thursday Art Play gives young children a hands-on CAC session tied to Homespun, with yoga and art making on July 9 2026.
Ayana Ross presents seven figural paintings at the Taft Museum as the 2026 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence.
Rites of Passage spotlights nine emerging artists at Manifest, opening July 10 with student work from eight U.S. states.
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...
Late Modernism, the last and least worthy phase of a wonderfully creative 150-year movement, petered out before the births of most of the painters in this show. In its wake, the art world, then mostly western in emphasis, embraced a new pluralism that has since come to include a vast international range of stylistic choices. These artists, raised in that environment, made...
Although the exhibition at the Thomas J. Funké Gallery is named “2 Artists/2 Perspectives: Jeff Shapiro and Don Reitz,” the “perspectives” of these two ceramic artists seem more aligned than not.
Visually Reitz’s and Shapiro’s work shares a roughness that borders on crude. It rudely slaps the refinement of much of traditional ceramics in the face. Their vessels...
With his usual reticence to tout his own achievements – “I don’t profess to have any particular insight other than doing it for a long time,” Barry Andersen succinctly distilled the major challenges facing the role of art education and art making in contemporary society over chili the other day. Professor Barry Andersen, head of the photography department in the College of Arts and Sciences at...
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.
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.
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."
Google Gemini has become the main global sponsor of the Argentine Football Association for the 2026 World Cup, WIRED reported on June 10. The agreement puts Gemini's name on Argentina's training kit and gives players and staff access to AI tools for play breakdowns, performance metrics, statistics, and opponent analysis. Google has not described the internal systems in detail, but the public side is clearer. During the tournament, Search will answer fan questions in real time, analyze key plays, supply deeper statistics, and help generate songs, memes, cartoons, and other match-day material for social platforms. The company has also reached deals with Brazil and France, but Argentina gives the project its most charged costume, a champion's shirt and the remaining aura of Lionel Messi.
Football has admitted machines before when they promised a narrower form of judgment. GPS measured training loads, VAR slowed down disputed goals, broadcast graphics converted movement into diagrams. Gemini enters through a wider door. Google places an assistant inside coaching work and beside the supporter, where memory, argument, insult, superstition, and statistics already mix during a match. The fan who once shouted at a television can now ask a phone for the correct number, the likely substitution, the usable meme, or the tactical explanation seconds after the whistle. Sponsorship usually rents visibility on cloth. This one tries to occupy the interval between the event and the sentence a spectator sends about it.
Jeff Bezos has backed Flourish, a neuro-AI startup trying to build artificial intelligence around the energy discipline of the human brain. According to Wired, the company has $500 million in funding, a reported $2.5 billion valuation, and a plan to study real neurons with advanced lab equipment while its engineers search for models that can learn continuously. The target is blunt. Flourish wants an artificial system that runs on 50 watts or less, close to the power budget of a person thinking, instead of the data-center hunger now attached to frontier AI. Its founders, Rob Williams and neuroscientist Thomas Reardon, argue that current language models consume vast power and data while remaining frozen after training.
The proposal returns AI to an older embarrassment. The industry borrowed the prestige of the brain, named its systems neural, then built machines that require warehouses, cooling plants, power contracts, and scraped archives to imitate a sentence. Flourish turns that mismatch into a business thesis. If the brain contains a usable computational trick, the next infrastructure race may pass through microscopes, connectomes, hippocampus research, chip negotiations, and patient venture money. The promise is elegant and suspicious in equal measure. A billionaire funds the search for biological thrift after the industry has made waste look inevitable. The laboratory bench now sits beside the server bill.
Silicon Valley's AI boom has created a premium market for paid human attention around the men who build, finance, and profit from automated intelligence. According to Forbes, high-end companions now court clients in and around the industry with a mixture of sex, technical fluency, emotional availability, and cultural codes drawn from AI, crypto, longevity, biohacking, and rationalist circles. Meida Marek, a pseudonymous recent graduate who left an entry-level finance job after wondering when AI would do it better, now sells companionship to clients that include people from Nvidia. Others in the niche market themselves through X posts, interactive booking portals, programming backgrounds, or the promise of being attractive enough for desire and informed enough for a three-hour argument. Forbes cites rates from about $3,000 to $5,000 an hour, with some day or weekend arrangements climbing far higher.
The sharper fact sits in the new price of unautomated presence inside a culture that keeps trying to simulate it. AI companionship makes attention cheap, obedient, tireless, and available on demand. AI wealth gives certain clients the money to buy the opposite experience. A human companion can be bored, skeptical, amused, delayed, distracted, technically literate, physically present, and socially dangerous in ways a chatbot is trained to smooth away. The invoice buys intimacy, but it also buys resistance to total optimization. The men building synthetic conversation pay for a dinner where the other mind is expensive because it can still leave the room.
