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...
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.
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...
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.
“Body of Art,” the exhibit currently at Prairie Gallery (on display through August 20, 2011), is a group show in which the weirdness and greatness of the individual works often outshine the reason they were pulled together in the first place. The show is a grab-bag of video, photography, sculpture, painting and drawing, and while the “body” might be the source of curatorial inspiration...
Initial Impression: Darkened rooms, interestingly arranged for multi-screened film projections. Walls and partitions simultaneously displaying black and white events. A slim man scatters a white powder over a grassy area. He is printing the universal signal for help, SOS, in large letters by drizzling a white powder on the grass. Written material nearby indicates that this piece reflects the questions...
In the late1950s and into the 1960s, the philosophies of composer John Cage permeated the arts. Allan Kaprow took Cage’s notion of incorporating all of life into (and as) music and invented the “happening,” where the human body took over as the artist’s medium, the environment the “canvas,” and the spontaneity of actions and occurrences surrogated the artist’s autonomy and hierarchy...
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...
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...
Publishers are beginning to treat books written by people as a premium product while generative AI makes cheap prose easier to produce, the Financial Times reported on July 27th. The paper describes a market in which some publishers see AI as a tool for authors and others imagine it replacing them. The distinction reaches the shelf. A reader buying a human-written book is paying for a named mind, a sustained voice, and the record of decisions that cannot be reduced to a prompt and a polished output.
The premium book turns authorship into a feature that can be advertised. For centuries, publishing has sold the work through a person's name, even when the labor behind that name included editors, translators, designers, printers, and booksellers. Generative systems disturb that chain by making fluent pages abundant and making their origin harder to see. A publisher can use software to accelerate research or revision, yet the reader still wants to know who carried the argument, chose the sentence, and remained answerable to the finished object. Human writing becomes expensive partly because the market has spent years treating language as an inexhaustible raw material. The price of the book may soon include a claim printed nowhere on its cover, that a person stayed with the manuscript from its first uncertainty to its final line.
Apple has pushed back the launch of its first smart glasses to late 2027 while working on how to make a camera worn on the face compatible with its privacy brand, TechCrunch reported on July 26th. The company is expected to emphasize on-device processing, avoid facial recognition, and promise that customer recordings will not be used to train AI models. The delay also reflects the trouble surrounding Meta's smart glasses, which have been criticized after users employed them for non-consensual recordings and other invasive behavior. Apple is not simply preparing a lighter computer. It is preparing an explanation for why anyone nearby should accept one.
The privacy problem begins outside the account. A phone asks its owner before it records, but glasses point toward a street, a table, a queue, or a stranger who may not know that a microphone and camera are active. On-device processing can limit where data travels. It cannot make the surrounding person consent, recognize the recording, or understand what the wearer is doing. Apple can remove facial recognition and keep footage out of model training, yet the public still has to share space with a device designed to see first and explain later. The product will arrive carrying a small promise of discretion. Its real test will be whether the people inside the lens can refuse the scene.
Librarians in the United States are drawing unusual crowds to workshops that teach people how to avoid consumer AI, TechCrunch reported on July 25th. In South Philadelphia, librarian Charlie Bailey asks adults to take out their phones so he can walk them through disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini. The class grew from a workshop designed by Maine librarian Hannah Cyrus, who began receiving questions from patrons asking why AI was writing emails, summarizing messages, and appearing inside devices they had not asked to change. Her usual computer classes drew about a dozen people. Her first Avoiding AI sessions filled registration, opened waitlists, and reached dozens more by livestream.
The avoidance class restores an old public function to the library. It does not treat technology as magic or enemy. It treats it as something a citizen should be able to inspect, refuse, and configure. That gesture is modest until one notices how rarely software now offers refusal in plain language. AI features arrive through operating systems, search boxes, office tools, phones, and workplace accounts as if adoption were the default condition of being modern. The librarian stands beside the projector and translates hidden settings into public knowledge. The people in the room are not rejecting medicine, accessibility, archives, or useful automation. They are asking for the right to decide when a machine enters their sentence, their inbox, their search result, and their pocket.
