recently my friend’s comics professor told her that it’s acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can’t generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister’s screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won’t be able to generate a script that’s any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.
It’s only ever the jobs we’re unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don’t.
“Helen Gorrill, the author of Women Can’t Paint, has studied the prices of 5,000 paintings sold all over the world and found that for every £1 a male artist earns for his work, a woman earns a mere 10p. “It’s the most shocking gender value gap that I’ve come across in any industry at all,” she told me for a BBC Radio 4 documentary, Recalculating Art.
It really is shocking. For some time, women have made up 70% of students in art college, selected on merit, and the art world prides itself on its liberal, progressive values. Yet it presides over the biggest pay gap I can think of.
Gorrill stumbled across another startling finding. While the value of a work by a man rises if he has signed it, the value of a work by a woman falls if she has signed it, as if it has somehow been tainted by her gender. “That’s just absolutely mind-blowing,” she says”
Artists hope to preserve and rebuild Gaza’s cultural heritage, December 30, 2025
Gaza has been a place of terror, war and struggle, but also a place with a rich cultural and artistic history. Much of that has been damaged or destroyed the last two years. Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown looks at the losses, but also at the hope some artists have for the future. It’s part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Creative Convening—Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, August 14, 2025
Dive deep into the themes found in the exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie through dynamic conversations, presentations, and readings by leading scholars, designers, and writers. Explore how the decorative style of chinoiserie shaped both European women’s identities and racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women in this critical look at the historical style and its afterlives.
The Tower Surrounded by Green,
late 19th–early 20th century
Workshop of Jian Guzhai
Late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) or early Republic period (1912–49), China
Ink
H. 3 in. (7.6 cm); W. 1 ½ in. (3.8 cm)
This ink tablet is from a sixty-four-tablet set (30.76.216–.279) commissioned by the Jiaqing emperor from the Studio for Appreciating the Antique (Jiangu Zhai) manufactory of the Wang Jinsheng family in Huizhou, Anhui Province. Each ink tablet commemorates a hall or pavilion in one of the imperial gardens. Each site’s name is written in gilt characters on one side; a view of the site is presented on the other. Such inks were purely decorative and not intended for use.
New Grand Egyptian Museum to exhibit millennia of cultural history, November 1, 2025
Many of Egypt’s historic artifacts are found in museums outside the country, but those within the country are about to be displayed in its new Grand Egyptian Museum. The museum fully opens its doors next week.
One of Egypt’s world-famous artifacts outside of the country has been on display for over a century in Germany’s capital Berlin. German archeologists found the bust of ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti in 1912 and took it from Egypt to Germany. Egypt wants it back.
Sebastian Conrad, Professor of Modern History at the Freie Universität Berlin and author of “The Queen – Nefertiti’s Global Career.”
Sudan’s cultural heritage becomes a casualty in its civil war, October 27, 2025
Sudan’s civil war has become a humanitarian catastrophe of staggering scale, marked by famine, ethnic cleansing and sexual violence. Over three years, an estimated 150,000 people have been killed, and nearly 13 million have been forced from their homes. But the destruction of Sudan’s cultural heritage has drawn far less attention. Jeffrey Brown reports for our art and culture series, CANVAS.
A rare and large puce-enameled ‘Five Dragon’ dish, 19th century
Qing dynasty, China
Diameter 17 ¾ in., 45 cm
The interior painted with a front-facing dragon and flaming pearl, surrounded by four further dragons amid flames, the exterior with a band of turbulent waves, the base with a double circle in underglaze blue.
One of a Pair of Vases with Dragon Handles, 19th century
One of a Pair of Vases with Dragon Handles
Qing dynasty (1644–1911), China
Cloisonné enamel with gilt bronze and champlevé
Dimensions: H. 18 ½ in. (47 cm); Diam. 13 in. (33 cm); Diam. of rim 6 ¼ in. (15.9 cm); Diam. of foot 7 3/8 in. (18.7 cm)
H. 18 ½ in. (47 cm); Diam. 13 in. (33 cm); Diam. of rim 6 ¼ in. (15.9 cm); Diam. of foot 7 7/16 in. (18.9 cm)
Cloisonné is a technique for creating designs on metal whereby enclosures made from copper or bronze wire that has been bent or hammered into a desired pattern are filled with colored glass paste. Known as cloisons (French for “partitions”), the enclosures are generally pasted or soldered onto the metal body. The glass paste, or enamel, is colored with metallic oxide and painted into the contained areas. The vessel is then fired, usually at a relatively low temperature, about 800 degrees centigrade. As enamels commonly shrink during firing, the process has to be repeated several times to fill the entire design. Once this process is completed, the surface of the vessel is burnished until the edges of the cloisons are visible.
The dragons in the four openwork cartouches on this vase are strikingly similar to those found on the robes in this gallery and illustrate the ubiquitous sharing of motifs that characterizes Chinese art in the Qing dynasty. This vase was most likely part of a set that included another vase, incense burner, and candlesticks, which would be displayed in public rooms and on ancestral altars. This vase is designed to be rotated on its base, a technical embellishment that is also (rarely) found in porcelain but has no true function.
Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1, 2
Ensayando la Postura Nacional by Alexander Apóstol
Based on the paintings of Pedro Centeno Vallenilla
Caracas experienced a strong urban construction growth after the death of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez in 1936 until the 70´s. Important political changes: European and Latin-American migrations, and especially petroleum costs variations made Venezuelan mentality change at a speeding race to new perspectives that were demonstrated in different areas, architecture being the main element of change towards a modern city. Besides the big social differences, from then on, the Venezuelans have conceived to an extreme this modern period of time as the dream of a better future.
In that time, important plastic artist irrupted during the 40´s, 50´s and 60´s; Escuela de caracas (landscaping), Los Disidentes (abstraction), and the Techo de La Ballena (informalism) were some of the most important avant-garde movements. Curiously enough, the Venezuelan artist Pedro Centeno Vallenilla, formed under the fascist Italian regime and exhibitor of a peculiar nationalist theme with a characterized mannerist and exaggerated aesthetic, worked independently from the avant-garde movements, he was even considered as a minor artist by them. Due to Vallenilla´s profound political views at the time, he was able to establish himself as the official painter during the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 50´s, where buildings like the National Capitol, the National Military or collections and private homes were decorated with his Works. Nowadays his works are still hung in these official buildings, where the nation’s history and the autochthonous elements together with the exaggerated and idealized aesthetic of the body and race, are the main characters in his work.
What interests me is how his fertile visual language feeds the creation myths of the birth of the nation and establishes it like a part of the Venezuelan culture, in the political, social, military and even economic grounds of the country; where his work exemplifies, maybe fortunately, the prejudice, contradictions and acceptations on how Venezuelans want to see ourselves and how we wanted to be seen (and still want to be), contrasting with the exacerbated and vulnerable narcissism that fundaments itself on the starting resentments that we drag on form the colonial times.
Finally I would like to focus Centeno Vallenilla´s work, independently from his pictorial quality, like the heir of a confused Venezuelan modernity in conception and ideology, confronted in the same way with the confused and complex political and social times that we are now living. Where the frontier between liberal ideologies and economic pragmatism associated with the conservatives, are faded together with the political ways of the country.
In the film and photos, works of Centeno Vallenilla dedicated to the nation’s history, race and traditions, are converted into a tableaux vivant by people that come from the marginated areas of Caracas, but that are situated in the natural context of this artist, these spaces are modern but at the same time unused buildings, like a mansion turned into an office building; Nevertheless, these models try again and again, without achieving the goal, of recreating work by work The forced postures of the personalities represented in Vallenilla´s Works, demonstrating that there is a possibility that the idiosyncrasy of Venezuela comes from the eternal intent, with form but without meaning, of imagining improvised utopias that result in mere rehearsals of the country.
Neon signs used to be synonymous with Hong Kong’s nightscape, but recent enforcement of government building rules has left the city’s streets mostly devoid of their famous glow. In this episode of Hong Kong Authentic, we look at what is replacing the traditional look of the Pearl of the Orient, and what Hongkongers are doing to preserve the city’s visual culture.
Related story: No switching off Hong Kong’s bright city lights as shops replace old neon signs https://sc.mp/cdlc
Shiva and his wife Uma sit next to each other on double lotus pedestals, between them a residual remnant of their small child, Skanda, now missing from the magnificent bronze. The standard format—known as Somaskanda—arose as early as the 6th century in temples from Tamil Nadu, and remains Shiva’s main manifest form today. In south Indian temples, bronze images play a huge role in devotional practice, where they are treated as living embodiments of the gods. The holes in the base indicate that this particular bronze would have been carried in processions outside the temple grounds. Priests dressed the gods in fine clothing, adorned them with flowers, and assembled an entourage of musicians and dancers to accompany them on a procession to bless the devotees who congregated along city streets.
