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The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust released a statement on Saturday slamming the recent decision by New York’s Danziger Gallery to offer an AI-generated artwork referencing the famed photographer’s work at the 2026 edition of the AIPAD Photography Show in April. The artwork, which still appears on Danziger’s website, does not contain a title but is headlined A.I. GENERATED, From the prompt: Make a realistic color version of Ansel Adams’ iconic “Moonrise Over Hernandez”. It is listed as printed by master printer Esteban Mauchi. Danziger offered the piece in its booth at the fair—which ran from April 22 to April 26—alongside work by Seydou Keïta, Hoda Afshar, and Matthew Porter, among others. In the statement, the trust said it “did not authorize, endorse, consent to, or acquiesce” to the work being exhibited or offered for sale and claimed that the piece “exploited Ansel’s name, reputation, and his most iconi...

Daniel Sikkema, the estranged husband of murdered New York art dealer Brent Sikkema, was found guilty Friday in a Manhattan federal court, according to the  Wall Street Journal . Daniel Sikkema faced charges tied to a murder-for-hire plot that prosecutors said led to the dealer’s killing at his vacation home in Rio de Janeiro in 2024.  The case has gripped the art world since Brent Sikkema, the founder of the Chelsea gallery then known as Sikkema Jenkins & Co.,  was found stabbed to death  in Brazil at age 75. Prosecutors argued that Daniel Sikkema orchestrated the killing from New York amid a bitter divorce and custody dispute involving the couple’s son. Federal prosecutors accused Daniel Sikkema of hiring Alejandro Triana Prevez, a Cuban former security officer living in Brazil, to carry out the murder. According to court filings and testimony presented during the trial, Prevez entered Brent Sikkema’s Rio townhouse in the early hours of Jan...

As demand accelerates for autonomous undersea systems that can move quickly from concept to deployment, Canadian marine technology firm Cellula Robotics and Metron, Inc . are formalizing a long-term partnership aimed at delivering next-generation capability to the United States defense market. Announced on May 19 in Houston, the 10-year agreement brings together Cellula’s commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) long-endurance autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) platforms with Metron’s adaptive mission autonomy and decades of operational experience in undersea warfare and maritime domain missions. The agreement builds on several years of collaboration between the two companies, including support work tied to the Defense Innovation Unit’s CAMP project. Together, the firms are positioning the partnership as a pathway to faster fielding, scalable deployment, and long-term operational support for US defense customers seeking reliable autonomous underwater capability. At the core of th...

By Kevin McCarthy  It’s the penultimate round but really, it may as well be the final round of Super Rugby Pacific for the Hurricanes, if they execute this weekend. There are as always the odd booby traps to make things tasty, however. The Crusaders host the Chiefs at their new home. Should they win, then...

A sacred Buddhist hall on the top of Mount Misen in Japan was destroyed by fire—but an “eternal flame” said to have been burning for more than a millennium was rescued and moved to another site, where it continues to glow. As reported in the New York Times , Reikado Hall, in the south of Japan, “was reduced to a charred skeleton after a fire tore through the building, engulfing its wooden prayer rooms.” No one was injured, fortunately, and the flame that had been burning for some 1,200 years was salvaged and transferred to a less traumatized location. In a statement, the Daisho-in temple, which oversaw the damaged hall, said, “We have received many messages of sympathy. Thank you for your concern.” Reikado Hall had been rebuilt after a previous fire in 2005, after an accident following cleanup from a typhoon. The cause of the latest fire in under investigation. The Times noted that Japanese temples and shrines, often constructed with materia...

Harald Metzkes, the so-called “Cézannist of Prenzlauer Berg” who made classically indebted and symbolically rich paintings following Germany’s surrender in World War II, died last Thursday in Brandenburg at the age of 97. His death was confirmed to the German Press Agency by his son, the sculptor Robert Metzkes. “Metzkes became particularly well-known in East Germany because he had no interest in socialist realism,” wrote Monopol , which asserted that he created his own “world theater” in work that wriggled free of East German strictures. The magazine quoted Robert Metzkes saying, of his father, “He wasn’t concerned with implementing cultural policy demands.” Metzkes was born in 1929 in Saxony, Germany, and in 1949 started studying painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1959 he moved to East Berlin, where he established a distinctive painterly style that “combined poetic imagery, references to classical modernism, and deeply symbolic...