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Lillian Schwartz, an artist who found visually dazzling ways of using computers to move painting into the future, blazing new trails for many digital artists who came after her, has died at 97. Kristen Gallerneaux, a curator at the Henry Ford Museum, whose collection includes Schwartz’s archive, confirmed her death on Monday. Schwartz’s films translated painterly styles into pixels, portraying warping forms and blinking grids using computer technologies. In that way, she found a means of injecting new life into the experiments being done on canvas by modernists during the first half of the 20th century. Her achievemen...... Read Full article on HadNews

The remains of what is thought to be a 4,000-year-old temple and theater have been discovered by archaeologists in Peru. Experts were alerted by the local government to looting near the northern Peruvian town Zaña and quickly moved to the area before any destruction occurred, a press release from the Field Museum in Chicago said. In June, the team began studying the Otra Banda, Cerro Las Animas archaeological site. They excavated a 33-foot square plot of land at a depth of six feet, where ancient walls formed from clay and mud were identified. “It was so surprising that these very ancient structures were so close to the mod...... Read Full article on HadNews

A Shahzia Sikander statue at the University of Houston was vandalized following previous protests by right-wing groups. The 18-foot-tall bronze monument to women and justice was beheaded in the early morning on July 8 while the campus was experiencing harsh weather and power outages due to Hurricane Beryl. Footage of the vandalism was obtained by campus police, according to the New York Times, which first reported the news. “We were disappointed to learn the statue was damaged early Monday morning as Hurricane Beryl was hitting Houston,” Kevin Quinn, the university’s executive director of media relations,...... Read Full article on HadNews

If you’ve spent time on Facebook over the past six months, you may have noticed photorealistic images that are too good to be true: children holding paintings that look like the work of professional artists, or majestic log cabin interiors that are the stuff of Airbnb dreams. Others, such as renderings of Jesus made out of crustaceans, are just bizarre. Like the AI image of the pope in a puffer jacket that went viral in May 2023, these AI-generated images are increasingly prevalent – and popular – on social media platforms. Even as many of them border on the surreal, they’re often used to bait engagement from ordinary users. Our tea...... Read Full article on HadNews

Rocco Ritchie wants to be taken seriously and he should. Resist the temptation to reduce him to his famous parents — Madonna and filmmaker Guy Ritchie, two talents with mega fame. Despite growing up in the glare of the media, the London-based artist isn’t blinded, or seemingly interested at all, in the fame game (or apparently trading off Madonna’s sizable social media reach.) For the past several years, he has been steadily and stalwartly creating art primarily under the radar. That is about to change with a private showing of his latest work, “Pack a Punch,” that debuts Wednesday evening through April 11 in Miami’s Design District v...... Read Full article on HadNews

For much of the year, TikTok has been on the defensive. On March 13, 2024, the House of Representatives voted to approve a bill that would force the short-form video app to be sold off from its Chinese parent company to non-Chinese owners or face a ban in the U.S. The Senate will still have to vote on the legislation, which received broad bipartisan support due to beliefs that TikTok creates risks to national security. Meanwhile, Universal Music Group, one of the biggest record labels in the world, stopped licensing its music to TikTok at the end of January 2024. Since then, songs by Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and scores of other ar...... Read Full article on HadNews

Nearly five years after the fire that decimated Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, the reconstructed spire was revealed in an Instagram post yesterday. The oak spire is 315 feet tall and is topped with a golden rooster and cross. Made to resemble the original, the spire is a copy of one made by Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century. This was the second spire made for the cathedral. The original 13th century spire was removed due to damage in the late 18th century. The newest iteration was designed by architect Philippe Villeneuve, head of Notre Dame’s vast renovation project. The new rooster was blessed by the Archbishop of Paris ...... Read Full article on HadNews

Lucas Samaras, an artist whose work in many mediums channeled alternate psychological states, has died at 87. His longtime gallery, Pace, which mounted 30 exhibitions of his work, said he died on Thursday. Since the 1960s, Samaras has been a beloved figure in New York for artworks that have never conformed to any specific movement. He produced unclassifiable sculptures, photographs, digital artworks, and more, and he always seemed to function along his own wavelength. “To a certain extent,” he once said, “I’m an outsider.” So disparate were his many bodies of work that he seemed to elude critics, even as t...... Read Full article on HadNews

CC BY-SA A major transformation is underway in Romancelandia. Once upon a time, romance novels from major U.S. publishers featured only heterosexual couples. Today, the five biggest publishers regularly release same-sex love stories. From May 2022 to May 2023, sales of LGBTQ+ romance grew by 40%, with the next biggest jump in this period occurring for general adult fiction, which grew just 17%. The data from 2023 extends a boom that began in 2016: In the five years from May 2016 to May 2021, sales of LGBTQ+ romance grew by a jaw-dropping 740%. It’s tem...... Read Full article on HadNews

Should actors and actresses who go to extremes to prepare for their roles get more love from Oscars voters? This year, best actor nominees Cillian Murphy, who played nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in “Oppenheimer,” and Bradley Cooper, who starred as Leonard Bernstein in the biopic “Maestro,” are getting lots of buzz not only for their performances but also for how those performances were achieved. The already slim Murphy lost roughly 20 pounds and took up smoking fake cigarettes to mimic the look and habits of the real-life Oppenheimer. His preparation for the role was purportedly so intense that he isolated himself from his...... Read Full article on HadNews

War doesn’t just destroy lives. It also tears at the fabric of culture. And in the case of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now about to enter its third year, the remarkable destruction of Ukrainian history and heritage since 2022 hasn’t been a matter of collateral damage. Rather, the Russian military has deliberately targeted museums, churches and libraries that are important to the Ukrainian people. It’s impossible to document the full extent of the destruction, particularly in the active military zones in eastern and southern Ukraine. However, as archaeologists and filmmakers, we wanted to do what we could. This meant tra...... Read Full article on HadNews

Diego Rivera is known for a multitude of paintings: vast murals that pay homage to the struggle of the proletariat, canvases that alluded to events and people from Mexican history, even still lifes that flirt with the Cubist style coming out of France during the early 20th century. But a lesser known work by him—a salacious painting of a nude New York socialite—ended up taking the spotlight on Thursday’s episode of the FX TV series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans (streaming on Hulu), which traces the manipulative friendships between the writer Truman Capote and the moneyed Manhattanites in his circle. One of those Manhattanites...... Read Full article on HadNews

There have been massive gains in productivity over the past century. So why are people still working so hard for so long? Output per worker increased by almost 300% between 1950 and 2018 in the U.S. The standard American workweek, meanwhile, has remained unchanged, at about 40 hours. This paradox is especially notable in the U.S., where the average work year is 1,767 hours compared with 1,354 in Germany, a difference largely due to Americans’ lack of vacation time. Some might argue that Americans are just more hardworking. But shouldn’t more productive work be rewarded with more time free from work? This is the central theme o...... Read Full article on HadNews

What is love? Could those feelings you label as love be something else? What about infatuation? Obsession? A passing fancy? Being smitten? Enthrallment? Beguilement? Lust? A crush? A squish? Platonic admiration? Why do people categorize some attachments as romantic love but not others? Suppose Holly meets someone on vacation. They quickly become romantically and sexually intimate and seem deeply compatible. Holly is from the U.K., where the term “holiday romance” is commonly used and part of her vocabulary. Because she knows this term, she can apply its social scaffolding to this relationship. She understands that the rapid emotiona...... Read Full article on HadNews

The three qualities that matter most in real estate also matter the most to graffiti artists: location, location, location. In Miami and Los Angeles, cities that contain some of the most expensive real estate in the U.S., graffiti artists have recently made sure their voices can be heard and seen, even from the sky. In what’s known as “graffiti bombing,” artists in both cities swiftly and extensively tagged downtown skyscrapers that had been abandoned. The efforts took place over the course of a few nights in December 2023 and late January 2024, with the results generating a mix of admiration and condemnation. ...... Read Full article on HadNews

For the journalism industry, 2024 is off to a brutal start. Most spectacularly, the Los Angeles Times recently slashed more than 20% of its newsroom. Though trouble had long been brewing, the layoffs were particularly disheartening because many employees and readers hoped the Times’ billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, would stay the course in good times and bad – that he would be a steward less interested in turning a profit and more concerned with ensuring the storied publication could serve the public. According to the LA Times, Soon-Shiong explained that the cuts were necessary because the paper “could no longer lose $30 mil...... Read Full article on HadNews

As poets have demonstrated for centuries, a sonnet for your beloved never goes out of style. The gift of verse may carry extra cachet this Valentine’s Day, on the heels of Taylor Swift’s announcement that her next album is poetry-themed. But in carrying out my research on Renaissance literature and gender, I’ve been struck by how many of that period’s love poems were not for lovers. These sonnets, composed for friends and family, are not just beautiful; they’re also a reminder that love and Valentine’s Day aren’t exclusively for couples. The love sonnet is born The sonnet was invented in 12th century Italy as a 14-line poem with 11...... Read Full article on HadNews

Toward the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, there’s a long take in which the camera roves around Brigitte Bardot’s nude body. We listen as her character takes stock of her shoulders, her mouth, her eyes, her nose, her ears, as she asks her lover if he admires them all. “Yes,” he responds. “I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.” The German artist Astrid Klein also appears to love Bardot totally, tenderly, tragically. In her piece Untitled (je ne parle pas…), Klein offers two-rephotographed images of a vampy Bardot strutting her stuff. Blown up to a scale that recalls advertisements pl...... Read Full article on HadNews

The Beatles are best known for their iconic albums, not necessarily for their visual art. But a painting made and signed by all four members of the band recently auctioned at Christie’s seems sure to help change that. Titled Images of a Woman (1966), the piece sold for $1.7 million with fees last week, nearly tripling its high estimate of $600,000. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison collaborated in making the acrylic and watercolor painting when they were confined in the Presidential Suite of the Hilton Hotel in Tokyo for 100 hours between June 29 to July 3, 1966. Japanese authorities decided that...... Read Full article on HadNews

Conservative Roman Catholics in Seville, Spain have deemed a poster of Jesus Christ, created to promote Easter week, offensive. The poster depicts Christ half nude with a beard and long hair, his lower-half covered by a white cloth, in front of a saturated red backdrop. It was designed by Seville–based artist Salustiano Garcia. Holy week, which includes Good Friday and Easter Sunday, honors the death and resurrection of Jesus. Seville is known for its huge festivities around the occasion. The council of brotherhoods and guilds, which oversees Easter week events in the Spanish city, claim the poster demonstrates “the ra...... Read Full article on HadNews