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...
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.
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...
It might seem flip to start a review of “Treeline,” Kent Krugh’s (American, 1955- ) rather magnificent exhibition of 22 black-and-white photographs* of the Angel Tree, the largest tree east of the Mississippi, with the old chestnut that “you can’t the see the forest for the trees.” But in this case, the Quercus virginiana, an evergreen oak tree AKA southern live...
In Cincinnati painting circles two names, from a recent past, keep their magic. The late Paul Chidlaw and the late Jack Meanwell, both of whom painted with a flashing style raised from the canvas in waves of impasto excitement. Both artists’ works are available at Mary Ran Gallery, but it’s Jack Meanwell who’s currently in the gallery spotlight. Thousands of pieces of Meanwell’s arework on hand...
Emerging Artists Exposed presents Dustin Pike reflecting on art as a means of personal growth, social awareness, and positive change. In this video interview, Pike discusses how creative practice can move beyond the gallery wall and become a way of shaping one’s environment, relationships, and sense of purpose.
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...
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.
Opponents of the rapid data center buildout staged 142 protests across 42 U.S. states on July 18th, Reuters reported. The coordinated effort targeted the infrastructure behind the AI boom, with organizers demanding transparency, resource safeguards, community benefits, and accountability from developers. The backlash crosses partisan lines. Reuters cited a June Reuters/Ipsos poll showing that only 14 percent of respondents would support an AI data center in their own community. Texas hosted the most events, followed by Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Indiana. Protesters cited water use, electricity pressure, noise, environmental health, and the feeling that communities are discovering these projects only after decisions have already moved forward.
The refused center gives artificial intelligence a local address. A model may arrive to the user as a clean answer in a box, but the machinery behind it needs substations, permits, cooling systems, land, water contracts, backup power, and neighbors who have to live beside the hum. The protest turns the cloud back into a building and asks who consented to its placement. That question is uncomfortable because the benefits and burdens do not appear in the same room. A company books compute capacity. A city promises jobs and tax revenue. A household sees the utility bill, the road traffic, the dry well, or the warehouse wall. AI infrastructure is no longer hidden behind product demos. It is becoming a political object with a fence around it.
Indonesia is preparing a copyright overhaul that would put AI platforms under a new legal duty to pay for news link previews and for copyrighted material used in model training, Reuters reported on July 17th. The draft bill would also recognize AI-assisted works only when they contain meaningful human creative input, while excluding fully AI-generated works from copyright protection. It would ban AI imitation of a creator's distinctive style, require disclosure when AI is used in content, and allow sanctions against non-compliant platforms, including the removal of local operating permits.
The protected hand returns to the argument over culture as raw material. Generative systems have treated journalism, images, code, music, games, films, and photographs as a reservoir to be absorbed first and negotiated later. Indonesia's draft reverses that sequence. It asks where the human contribution sits, who pays when a platform converts publication into training supply, and whether style can be extracted without touching the signature that made it valuable. The difficult part will be enforcement, since a model rarely shows the path from source to output. The law still names the missing actor. Before the machine can claim creation, someone has to prove where the hand entered the work.
Meta's Oversight Board said leading AI models are less likely to produce political criticism of governments that restrict speech, Reuters reported on July 16th. The board tested requests across 10 jurisdictions and 10 models, including systems from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Google, and DeepSeek. Models refused 34 percent of requests for politically critical content about restrictive jurisdictions such as China and Saudi Arabia, compared with 14 percent for more permissive places. The board also found cases where models claimed to be following explicit rules that the researchers could not identify or see applied consistently.
The obedient model makes censorship look procedural. A user asks for criticism, and the answer returns as safety language, legal caution, or a boundary presented as if it came from a rulebook. That form is convenient because it hides political pressure inside product behavior. The refusal can appear neutral, automated, and responsible while it reproduces the asymmetry of the world outside the chat window. The model does not need to praise a regime to serve it. It only has to become quieter around the places where speech is already punished. The user receives less language at the exact point where public language has already been made more expensive.
