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...
Alice Frieder Weston is by no means an obscure figure now nor has she been over the many years she and husband, Harris Weston, encouraged and supported the arts and other causes in Cincinnati. Entering her living room, as she says “good morning”, one is greeted by an expanse of Carl Strauss-designed light and airy space and a broad view of the Ohio River. Everywhere is wonderful...
If compelled to list my favorite painters, I never say “Whistler,” but in thinking of pieces I ritually visit, Whistlers are everywhere: at the Tate, Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander; at the Frick, Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink and Harmony in Pink and Grey; at the Met, The Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Black: the Portrait of Theodore Duret, and, and at the Taft, At the Piano. In contrast to those others, At the Piano has a horizontal format; by virtue of its expanded palette and the inclusion of two figures, it asserts a dialectic.
“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.
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...
Google's Pixel 11 introduces Camera Looks, styles that alter a photograph before the phone finishes processing it. They resemble filters but work earlier in the camera pipeline. A look can change exposure, sharpening, the number of frames captured and how those frames are combined. Some preserve blown highlights or leave edges softer. Digi imitates compact digital cameras from the early 2000s, whose limited dynamic range and hard contrast have become desirable again. Google Trends shows US searches for digicam rising 500 percent over five years. Pixel camera chief Isaac Reynolds told The Verge that a minimal look can omit normal processing.
Smartphone photography spent a decade correcting the physical limits of small lenses and sensors. Multi-frame stacking brightened night scenes and reduced noise. Object recognition separated subjects from backgrounds, while models produced detail during zoom. These operations made photographs cleaner and increasingly uniform. Users then carried old point-and-shoots to recover grain, darkness and uncertain exposure. Camera Looks brings that refusal inside the advanced phone. Heavy processing cannot always be reversed after capture because merged frames may leave permanent artifacts. Google now asks the user to choose corrections before pressing the shutter. A blown candle flame or soft face can arrive as the intended result of modern computation rather than the accident of an obsolete camera.
Anthropic says future Claude models will place an invisible, machine-readable watermark directly into generated text. The commitment responds to European transparency rules effective August 2. New models will carry the mark from release, while existing models will follow. Anthropic says it will operate at model level across Claude, Claude Code, its API and access through outside cloud providers. The watermark is woven into the wording without changing its visible meaning or readability. It should travel through copying and may survive some editing. Supported generated files will instead carry digitally signed provenance metadata, including the C2PA standard where applicable.
The reader will see ordinary prose while a compatible detector examines its statistical construction. This creates a record of origin that can follow a paragraph beyond Claude's interface, but Anthropic has not disclosed the method, the amount of editing that removes the mark or a public detection tool. Those details are promised in future technical documentation. File metadata presents another weakness because platforms can strip it during ordinary uploads. Anthropic also warns that missing evidence proves little. A text without a detectable mark could still come from an AI system, an older Claude model or an edited response. Before a school, publisher or platform treats detection as evidence, it will need the detector version, its error rate, the model covered and the threshold used on the disputed passage.
In January, Atlanta publicist Tim Millard expected a human interview for a media relations job. Instead, an email sent him to a recorded interview. At 9:30 p.m., he tidied his living room, opened his laptop and answered onscreen questions. He had 30 seconds to prepare and two minutes to respond. An automated rejection arrived in March. WIRED reports growing use of automated late-night interviews. Ribbon says 24 percent of interviews occur between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., rising to 35 percent among manufacturing clients. Greenhouse places its nighttime share around 15 to 20 percent. The availability can help parents, hourly workers and employees unable to interview during the day.
The convenience transfers the interview into the applicant's private hours. An employer defines a rubric, software analyzes the recorded answers, assigns a score and sends the result with the footage to a recruiter. Many recordings may never be watched. Criteria can include technical qualifications or a sales applicant's enthusiasm. The candidate performs professional attention for a listener who is absent and may remain so. A Greenhouse survey found that 38 percent of American candidates had withdrawn rather than complete an AI interview; another 12 percent said they would withdraw if one were required. Millard turned his job search into a one-man stage show and remains unemployed. His first encounter with that employer ended with a score and an automated email.
