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...
Quite a lot is going on in the engrossing exhibition of Melvin Grier’s photographs at Kennedy Heights Arts Center.. One narrative line is this city, reflected in a daily newspaper over a period of more than thirty years. Another has to do with the photographer himself, a black man recording the affairs of a city that never lost sight of itself as white. The show’s title, White People: A Retrospective, comes from Grier’s...
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...
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."
Meta has begun separating itself from Manus, the Chinese-founded agentic AI startup it agreed to buy for $2 billion, after Beijing ordered the transaction unwound on national security grounds. According to TechCrunch and Bloomberg, Meta has cut Manus off from internal systems, halted data sharing, and stopped employees from using its tools for company projects. Manus's founders have reportedly discussed raising about $1 billion to reclaim the company, possibly through a structure that keeps it closer to Chinese control and opens a path toward a Hong Kong listing.
The failed deal shows how AI acquisitions now pass through a sovereignty filter before they become corporate strategy. Meta wanted agent technology, investors wanted an exit, and Manus had already moved staff to Singapore. Beijing still treated the startup's origin, talent, data access, and technical direction as assets that could not simply be transferred to an American platform. The separation also follows tighter Chinese rules around foreign investment and travel permissions for AI researchers. Capital can cross borders quickly, but model builders, datasets, and internal tools now trigger state claims before the contract dries. For Meta, the missing asset is no longer a term sheet. It is a tool its own employees have been told to stop using.
A Munich court has preliminarily ruled that Google can be held liable for false statements generated by AI Overviews, after two publishers said the search feature wrongly associated them with scams and questionable business practices. Google argued that the summaries were automated, that users were warned about possible errors, and that people should verify the information independently. The court took a harder view. It found that the disputed summaries created new, substantial statements that did not appear in the linked sources and that Google, as the company designing, training, operating, and managing the system, was the party able to prevent the damage.
The ruling moves liability from the linked page to the answer layer. A search engine used to defend itself as a directory of other people's statements. AI Overviews changes the operation by combining sources, compressing them, and presenting a generated sentence at the top of the page. If that sentence invents an accusation, the injured party cannot sue the original source, since the original source never said it. A warning label becomes thin protection when the falsehood arrives in the voice of the search interface itself. Google may appeal, but the case gives publishers, companies, and private people a procedural path toward the model operator, not the web pages it misread.
The US government has ordered Anthropic to suspend access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 for any foreign national, even those living inside the United States and even foreign employees of Anthropic itself. These were among the most powerful AI models ever shown to the public. Anthropic's response was to remove both models automatically for all users. The move is highly unusual, and in the public history of commercial AI releases, nearly without precedent. Fable 5 had just been released as Anthropic's most powerful widely available model, with safeguards around cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and model distillation. Mythos 5 used the same underlying system with some safeguards lifted for trusted cyberdefenders.
The order exposes a strategic contradiction. Washington appears to be trying to keep the most capable American systems away from adversaries, yet the immediate effect is to remove an American model from the market. Anthropic says the government cited a possible way to bypass Fable's safety protections, but the company argues the example was of lesser importance, involved minor known vulnerabilities, and showed capabilities already available in other public models. AI is advancing at an exponential and vertiginous pace, which raises the chance that other countries may soon reveal models stronger than anything they have shown publicly so far, including Chinese systems developed outside American controls. If that happens while US models remain trapped behind emergency restrictions, the advantage shifts from technical superiority to commercial availability. Measures like this could even push frontier AI companies to ask whether remaining inside the United States has become a strategic liability. In AI, power belongs partly to whoever builds the strongest model, and partly to whoever can keep it usable.
