OLD NEWS

BORN THIS DAY IN 1884, ON NESKUCHNOYE ESTATE IN UKRAINE,
the marvelous painter Zinaida Serebriakova.
After my time, but worth making exception!
Here by herself at her mirror in 1909.
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At the mirror again,
in a more sober moment two years later
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Self portrait as Pierrot, 1911.
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Cold winter's morning in Russia, 1910.
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Poultry yard in snow, by Zinaida Serebriakova, 1910.
Somebody has been looking,
perhaps, at Japanese prints?
Really like this.
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So sleep Binka --
her son Eugene and his friend,
sleeping, in 1908.
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Eugene, the artist's son,
looking pensive in 1909,
with his miniature livestock & soldiers.
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Lunch, painted in 1914
More poignant when you realize
that the Revolution
would shatter this family
only three years later.
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The painter's children
in the nursery at Neskuchnoye.
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Apples on branches, 1910,
What a sense of pattern & color!
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Studio still life by Zinaida Serebriakova.
Another artist who knew
value of plaster casts of ancient sculpture!
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Their father has died in prison,
they've lost their home,
food is scarce,
they are refugees.
The artist's children in 1919:
House of Cards.
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Ten years later, in France:
Katia leaning out the window
in a Rembrandt moment,
by her mother.
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Tata & Katia in the mirror.
And mum, painting.
And one of the boys running by. In 1917,
just before life fell apart
for the Russian elite like artist Zinaida Serebriakova,
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Katya with her dolls;
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Katya in the kitchen.
Painted by her mother,
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A lovely cat with Natasha Lancere.
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Marvelous portrait of Lola Braz, 1910.
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Woman in white, Morocco, 1928.
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Moroccan man in green, 1932
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Self-portrait wearing a scarf,
by Zinaida Serebriakova.
Today has been her day
<https://tinyurl.com/mvjbf8s9> . _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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HITO STEYERL’S ‘MEDIUM HOT’: THE AGE OF SLOP
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When Marshall McLuhan attempted to categorise media along a ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ spectrum in 1964, artificial intelligence was still in its infancy, of interest primarily to programmers and sci-fi enthusiasts. That AI could produce media was an unfathomable idea. Whether hot (film, radio, photographs) or cool (telephone conversations, printed cartoons), McLuhan believed media was ‘an extension of man’, of our eyes and ears. Today, his distinction between hotter, more passive forms and cooler, more participatory media comes across as dated. Our modern attention spans are simply overheated. When social media feeds can be scrolled through at a feverish pace, everything seems to run hot. Is it a coincidence that the dichotomy between a ‘cool’ past and the ‘hot’ present also mirrors the intensifying rate of climate change?
This thermodynamic language is employed throughout Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (2025), a new essay collection by the artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl, to scrutinise the technological forces accelerating entropy in both the virtual and natural worlds. Steyerl has worked closely with artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology in her artistic practice, years before AI broke through to the mainstream. Her multimedia installation This Is The Future (2019) used AI to produce a series of digital plants, which bloom and evolve based on predictive algorithms, and her film Animal Spirits (2022) contained computer-generated animations. Medium Hot details Steyerl’s image-making experiments from 2017 to 2024, when her increasing familiarity with AI led Steyerl to fixate on its deleterious consequences, as the technology began to seep into every aspect of the media landscape.
Medium Hot’s title riffs on Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), a film about a television cameraman who becomes mired in the political turmoil he is tasked with documenting. Wexler’s cameraman is a proxy for television’s cool disaffectedness. The character is so callously inured to any kind of firsthand violence that his first instinct is to record it. The film probes the ethics of TV production by incorporating real-life footage alongside fictional scenes. In doing so, Wexler (who was a cinematographer before he was a director) appears to implicate himself in the act of image-making.
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To a similar extent, Steyerl raises unresolvable questions about the future of image production in the age of AI, which she believes is increasingly ‘inseparable from da/mage-making’. This kind of pluralistic wordplay is typical of Steyerl, and reflects the multivalent quality of her intellectual project. As AI becomes incorporated into most tech products, creative workers are at risk of becoming dependent on ‘proprietary pipelines’, Steyerl argues. Their ability to work, as well as their personal data and projects, will be inevitably linked to big tech companies like Adobe and Google. Of particular concern is how any content on the internet, regardless of copyright protection, can be absorbed into training data without the creator’s permission. As a result, artists may find themselves unwittingly fooled or forced into the AI ecosystem. Take Adobe’s terms of service, updated last February, which suggested that user content may be used for machine learning, leading to alarm <https://tinyurl.com/3umd9zy6> among its users.
Steyerl’s essays tend to follow a deterministic structure, beginning with a narrow focus on a single idea or concept before branching out towards its broader political and technological implications. She returns throughout to the natural resources and human labour that power AI’s virtual infrastructure. AI’s computational capabilities are not siloed to the virtual realm, Steyerl reminds us. The technology has a hefty energy footprint, something that Big Tech has worked to hide. Medium Hot addresses the exploitative and energy-intensive acceleration of the AGI (artificial general intelligence) ‘arms race’, as Steyerl puts it, that is rapidly increasing the carbon footprint of corporations like Microsoft, Google, and Apple; how AI-based tools by military software providers are being tested, refined and deployed in war zones; and how AI’s seamless interface is maintained by an underclass of human workers performing ‘cheap clickwork’, sometimes directly out of conflict regions like Syria <https://tinyurl.com/5h7aem8p> and Palestine. ‘While data-based cultures are stagnant, they still move everything else around them,’ Steyerl writes. ‘They heat atmospheres, move people, and burn through resources.’
No doubt these systemic analyses are persuasive, wide-ranging and deeply researched. But in striving to be comprehensive, Steyerl can also needlessly circle around crises. In her ‘Mean Images’ essay, for example, she briefly mentions the AI firm SenseTime, which produced the surveillance software used by the Chinese government to monitor Uyghurs, in a discussion on the eugenicist history of statistics and its role in facial recognition technology, before moving on without further interrogation of the state-sanctioned atrocities it has enabled.
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Steyerl is most compelling when she leads with the expertise derived from her own artistic experiments and encounters within the artworld. These range from the responses Steyerl prompted from ChatGPT in an attempt to ascertain whether machines can produce aesthetic judgements, to ‘Twenty One Art Worlds’, an essay formatted as a choose-your-own-adventure game set within the art world. And in ‘Knuckleporn or Phocomelia’, Steyerl explores why image generators fail to faithfully render human anatomy, drawing parallels to medieval art. Here, Steyerl fixates on the regressive tendencies of machine-generated images; their monstrous mistakes are simply ‘a reflection of the social constellations’ of visual elements drawn from a data pool of digital-sameness. Eventually, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and MidJourney will be overrun by slop. AI image generators, then, are nothing more than a thinly-veiled magic trick, operating on the logic that ‘if one just captures “everything”, a real underlying pattern will be captured too’. But this knowledge paradigm is greatly limited, Steyerl argues, as it ‘erases the possibility of capturing something which is not yet already known’. Because they are programmed on probability, predictive algorithms have a stultifying effect on visual culture.
The book’s most salient essays build upon Steyerl’s existing theory of images. In 2009, she published ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, a treatise on the boom of low-resolution imagery online. The poor image addresses the form of mass-distributed copies, screenshots, torrents and compressed thumbnails. Akin to visual debris, it ‘operates against the fetish value of high resolution’ in a commercial media landscape where high-quality content is increasingly copyrighted and protected. As a result, the poor image has manifold significance. It rejects the image economy’s widespread commercialisation, but also foreshadows an information landscape that thrives ‘on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.’
Steyerl’s theory has proved to be prescient. Written before social media became widespread, the essay anticipated the 2010s boom in memes and meme culture writ large. In the 2020s, Steyerl believes the poor image will become an endangered species: soon, most images circulating on the internet will no longer be photographic representations of reality, but data-based renderings that are essentially a programmatic fantasy. The ‘statistical image-making’ of Stable Diffusion and DALL-E derives its contents from large but ultimately incomplete datasets. The generated result is an average composite image that represents the machine’s idea of reality: six-fingered hands <https://tinyurl.com/3k2tavuh> , distorted limbs, exaggerated body proportions and eerily smooth foods. <https://tinyurl.com/2tyypkt8>
Medium Hot introduces a taxonomic framework for this visual phenomena – one that feels, at times, bloated and frantic in its categorical overlap. ‘Burnt-out images’ refer to works made from AI diffusion models, in which noise, or random data, is added to training data and then removed to generate an image. This diffusion process gives rise to what Steyerl dubs a ‘derivative image’, a term that echoes the concept of ‘derivatives’ in financial systems, highlighting the model’s extractive nature. Consider the derivative image a counterfeit version of the poor image. While the poor image attempts to skirt copyright limitations, the derivative image’s condition for existence is predicated on ‘large-scale data theft’. Steyerl highlights too the bias embedded in the AI means of production but ultimately resists the proposition that models should be inclusively reprogrammed on the basis that implementing diverse training data would only require more labour from microworkers and exacerbate the problem of data theft. AI thrives on disenfranchisement, contributing to ‘multipolar surveillance and… profound social disruptions’.
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It’s tempting to wonder, then, what we should dare hope for. Are there any artist collectives or start-ups resisting this widespread computational absorption? Is there legislation being passed to limit resource waste? Disappointingly, Medium Hot doesn’t cohere into a manifesto for the contemporary image worker – the artists, photographers, actors and creative laborers whose work is being subsumed into training data as their livelihoods are increasingly automated. In fact, Steyerl seems altogether resigned to the fact that her work has already been pilfered by AI. ‘I don’t really care that much. If anyone wants to automate me, just go ahead,’ she joked in a 2023 interview. Indeed, Steyerl is more comfortable exposing the exploitative hijinks of machine-learning systems than proposing alternative modes of resistance. She speaks to the necessity of protest for workers to wrest back agency from tech monopolies, likening the 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike to a powerful form of ‘reverse entropy’. But beyond her verbal endorsements of collective organising, Steyerl offers little else against the impending tidal wave of AGI implementation. ‘Things are moving so quickly that the swift obsolescence of any current ideas about them is unavoidable,’ she writes in her introduction.
Steyerl has directly worked and tinkered with the technologies appraised in Medium Hot throughout her career. She resists the didactic instinct of recent books on internet culture — writing that either absolves the reader of their own helplessness or suggests changes in individual behavior that have little bearing on the systemic issues at hand. Yet, her seeming resignation towards AI sounds oddly familiar, even as her writing exists in stark contrast to the wave of consumer-friendly books on AI, penned by both skeptics and enthusiasts alike.
Steyerl challenges us to recognise the vast scale of AI’s ubiquity and to realise its ‘artificial stupidity’ by disentangling its inner workings. This reminds us that image-making has always been illusory. The camera’s history is fraught with visual tricks, misconceptions and self-deceptions. Recall how in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the photographer’s search for truth collapses into grainy ambiguity, exposing the limits of perception and the instability of the real. Steyerl’s work reminds us that no one, no matter how much they resist, exists outside the infrastructures of computation, caught in the blur between representation and extraction. Our visual culture may be shifting toward probabilistic abstractions, but what remains crucial is a strong ethical commitment to staying with reality. _Terry Nguyen _ArtReview

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MARTIN WONG, UNTITLED, 1973
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THE YEAR AI CAPTURED ART by Martin Herber`
Remember 2021? Pretty bad year! In many ways, though, 2025 makes you nostalgic for it. Case in point: currently,in Berlin, Seth Price is showing works based on generative images of interiors that he made, then archived, during that mid-pandemic timeframe – when generative AI was merely a brand-new, glitchy distraction – and has now lightly humanised using gestural paint strokes. Typically savvy, these tech-driven works avoid short-term obsolescence by consciously leaning into outmoded, slightly spooky aesthetics, characterised by janky hybridised forms. They’re also strongly present-coded, addressing the headlong incursion and increased verisimilitude of AI and how human makers engage with, or against, it. If one was looking, as I am here, for a throughline in the art of 2025, it’d likely be that: the increasing centrality of a technological revolution that most people didn’t ask for but no one can escape.
Artists’ opinions on this subject presently run the gamut from scathing to opportunistic to hopeful. Readers of this magazine’s recent roundtable on ‘post AI-art’ saw creators such as Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst – who’ve long treated the technology as a challenge to, and a rerouting of, human creativity – zooming out to glimpse artistry in the shaping of specific platforms for gen AI-assisted art making, rather than in the outputs themselves. Others turn AI on itself. Also currently on show in Berlin, in a solo show , is Charmaine Poh’s video GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY (2023), for which the Singaporean artist and former child-actress built a deepfake using her many TV appearances, her twelve-year-old self now retrospectively speaking back against her internet trolls. An artist like Philippe Parreno, meanwhile, whose terrific show at Munich’s Haus der Kunst spanned the first half of this year, poeticises ‘loving the alien’ in regard to how generative technologies interact with humans and nature, suggesting hitherto unthought affective possibilities in the process.
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At the other end of the spectrum, the rise of prompt-generated, internet-swamping AI slop – accelerated, since spring, by ChatGPT’s new image-generating capacities – has occasioned both incisive opposition (see for example Hito Steyerl’s recent essay collection Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat) and the embrace of something like a new, deeply ugly, mindless aesthetic (see Dean Kissick’s semi-sloptimist essay in Spike, ‘The Vulgar Image’). I personally don’t want to engage with something that diminishes my ability to think critically, though hats off if you can thread that needle. And yet, just as a chaotic recombinant internet aesthetic is spreading IRL via objects like Labubus, you can’t escape slop by simply avoiding screens. You can also find non-digital brainrot at art fairs, which – though this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach notably featured a dedicated AI-art section – are still infested with undemanding abstract and figurative painting, as if frozen in a mythical, hazy version of the first half of the twentieth century. Developments here, in an art market that’s wobbled down and up unpredictably this year, are not formal but infrastructural, with bigger galleries chasing inventory and youth appeal by increasingly snapping up the Instagram-friendly emerging artists they’d normally wait for mid-level galleries to hothouse. The big ‘ism’ in contemporary art, in other words, remains good old capitalism.
Recently, interested in seeing something that would take me away from all this, slow everything down and make me think, I went to the Bourse de Commerce in Paris to visit guest-curator Jessica Morgan’s sizeable Minimalism retrospective, Minimal. The astute artist friend I saw it with pointed out that this was an ironically appropriate time to revisit this work, because it was made in a context of war – Vietnam – but generally refused to refer directly to it. (The show, fwiw, is a busy cavalcade arranged in the venue’s circular spaces, with little room to be alone with any work, inviting a viewer to hustle unthinkingly through it, ticking boxes: very 2025.) You could, equally, beam down from space into many galleries and fairs right now and get no sense of our absolutely dystopian and knife-edge era, even though there are so many consequences of a sclerotic capitalist system to be vociferously angry about. The obvious reason for this is that rich collectors don’t want to face the consequences of greed and inequality, and galleries tied to the fair system need such people to keep the lights on.
The contrast is starker when you look at the products of mainstream culture that manage to mirror something of our moment. One thing I intuited repeatedly from some of the past year’s most forceful (and, not coincidentally, celebrated) products in film, TV, music – director Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, showrunner Vince Gilligan’s anti-AI series Pluribus (thus far), US band Geese’s rock-rebooting album Getting Killed – is a channelled, bare-wires frustration and broad quality of pushback that feels clarifying, productive, near-cathartic. I didn’t see so much of this kind of darkly inventive poetics in contemporary art this year, with the exceptions of Ed Atkins’s Tate Britain retrospective and Jesse Darling’s show at Molitor in Berlin. Maybe, though, I was looking in the wrong places, often at something which seemed to answer the question ‘what did you do in the forever war?’ by saying ‘I made colourful abstract painting’. (There is of course good colourful abstract painting too, and a need for momentary respite; we just don’t need to see it all the time.)
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Artists in general are nothing but resourceful and determined, nevertheless, and it’s worth remembering that one way to encourage at least a stubborn minority interest in things made by humans is to multiply the number of crappy things made by nonhumans (that is, if they can find said human-made things). There’s always hope, however embattled. In the first episode of his admittedly anti-counterculture 1969 TV series Civilisation, the art historian Kenneth Clark looks at how art, or at least the visual culture of illuminated manuscripts, survived the Dark Ages; humans managed that, as the segment’s title goes, ‘By the Skin of Our Teeth’. The seeds of artistry a dozen centuries ago, in a context of widespread barbarianism, were nurtured by an archipelago of relatively small communities such as windswept monks marooned on Hebridean islands. If art is to live through its current predicament – pincered between defanging market forces and the encroachments of AI – cross your fingers that we have similar tenacity and similar luck. _ArtReview

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HIROSHI SUGIMOTO - THE LONG NEVER
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Josef Sudek, Untitled (egg on plate), 1930
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Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
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Hisaja Hara. A Study of 'The Still Lifes 3' (Grapes)
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Harry Callahan, Chicago (1951
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Walker Evans, Kitchen Corner
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Josef Sudek, Untitled [Slice of Watermelon], 1954
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Scene from 'Eine frau ohne liebe'- Luis Bunuel (1951)
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Shigeru Imai, Still Life, 1939.
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Ringl + Pit (Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach) - Columbus’ Egg, 1930
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Roger Fenton - Tankard and Fruit, 1860
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Masao Yamamoto
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A goldfish contest!
<https://tinyurl.com/5xr4wdhw> _RabihAlameddine