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Showing posts from March, 2026

Site of Failed Pompidou Museum in Jersey City May Become Affordable Housing

After a years-long saga with countless twists and turns came to end last month, new reports signal that the site once prepared for the Centre Pompidou’s Jersey City museum has been eyed for affordable housing and community space. As reported by Gothamist (beneath a headline that begins “Au Revoir, Pompidou”), Jersey City Mayor James Solomon, shortly after taking office in January, “announced Monday that the city would work with Kushner Real Estate Group on new plans for the Artwalk Towers development at 808 Pavonia Ave. in Journal Square.” That runs starkly counter to once-ambitious plans for a starry outpost of Paris’s Centre Pompidou in a city just across the Hudson River from New York. As reported by ARTnews when the plans were summarily canceled, the Centre Pompidou x Jersey City “was first announced in 2021 as a 58,000-square-foot museum set in a 109-year-old building on Journal Square. But as often happens in New Jersey, local politics interfered, and the plan quickly fest...

Our Critics Are Split on the Weirdest Whitney Biennial in Recent Memory

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The Whitney Biennial is both the most important recurring art exhibition in the US and, often, the most polarizing one . During a year when notions about what does and doesn’t constitute Americanness are the subject of everyday discourse, this survey of American art has now returned for its 82nd edition at the Whitney Museum in New York. Curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, it is bound to spur on yet more debate. Some 56 artists are included in this biennial, and they hail from countries ranging from Palestine to the Philippines to Japan. Working in mediums such as performance, sculpture, and painting, and even utilizing AI and other emergent technologies, these artists appear to be concerned with a concise set of themes: the relationship between humans and nonhumans, the influence of American empire on foreign nations, how infrastructure can either support or hurt those who rely upon it, and the meaning of horror imagery during fearsome times. With the biennial having offic...

Club Rugby Summer Series: Trophies Chat Volume 2

Northern United and Marist St Pat’s celebrate their shared Jubilee Cup title win in 2008, the last time it was shared. The cup itself is lidless, and had been for at least 35 years.  There are many cups and trophies that are contested each year between clubs or internally in clubs to be presented at...

Supreme Court Declines to Reconsider Copyright Case on AI Art

The US Supreme Court said on Monday that it will not hear a case over whether art by artificial intelligence can recieve copyright protection. The decision all but ends the years-long quest by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to have art crafted by his AI system “DABUS” recieve federal copyright protection. In a 2024 profile in Art in America , Thaler told Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that he viewed DABUS as a “proto-conciousness” capable of experiencing stress and trauma. Gaining copyright protection, as Thaler painted it, was about affirming the agency of his AI model, rather than ensuring some financial benefit. “Is DABUS an inventor? Or is he an artist?” he said at the time. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you that. It’s more like a sentient, artificial being. But I even question the artificial part.” Thaler’s quixotic quest began when he submitted a federal copyright registration in 2018 for the artwork A Recent Entrance to Paradise , produced during one of his many experiments w...

The Lume, the Controversial Immersive Digital Art Gallery at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Closed at the End of February

In 2021, the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields turned the museum’s fourth floor contemporary art galleries into an exhibition space for high-tech digital art called the Lume. Over the past five years, the controversial initiative featured immersive, crowd-pleasing exhibitions like “Van Gogh Alive” (2021), “Monet & Friends Alive” (2022-23), and “Dalí Alive” (2024-25). However, at the end of February the museum announced that the Lume’s current show, “Connection: Land, Water, Sky — Art & Music from Indigenous Australians,” which closed on Feb. 28, was its last. The museum said in a statement to the Indianapolis Business Journal that the closure will make way for “a new monumental exhibition that will further advance the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s contemporary art vision and expand how audiences experience art at Newfields,” though didn’t elaborate on what this new endeavor entails. The Lume space was created by the Australian company Grande Experiences, which special...

Egyptian Tour Guide Arrested After Drawing on Pyramid

An Egyptian tour guide was arrested last week after video circulated on social media purportedly showing the man sketching a stick figure onto a pyramid. In the video, originally posted to X, the man is seen drawing the figure onto the wall of the Pyramid of Unas, built in the 24th century BCE and located in Saqqara, a funerary complex not far from the Pyramids of Giza. The man appeared to be speaking to tourists during the incident and is shown trying to wipe the drawing away with his hands. After the video went viral, Egyptian police found that the Saqqara Tourism Police Station had received a report from an antiquities inspector that a tour guide “had damaged an antiquity by drawing on the outer casing of one of the pyramids for the purpose of explaining to a group of tourists who were with him,” the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior said in a post on X. The drawing has since been removed, and the tour guide confessed to the incident. “Legal measures” were taken against the man...

The Whitney Biennial Swaps Identity Politics for Infrastructural Interventions. The Verdict: All Systems Go.

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This year’s Whitney Biennial spotlights “the greater United States”—a term from historian Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire . It describes not only the country’s 50 states but also its occupied countries, annexes, military bases, and territories. Strategically, Immerwahr argues, words like “colony” and “empire” have been evaded by officials since World War II—but that’s just semantics. As the country turns 250, the 2026 Whitney Biennial—that storied finger on the pulse of American art—takes a deliberate look beyond the “logo map,” another of Immerwahr’s terms for the geographic shape most people picture when they think of “the United States.” Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer included artists from US-occupied Okinawa, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; from Chile, where the US engaged in clandestine interventions; from current and former territories, like Puerto Rico and the Philippines; and from Palestine, where the US continues to fund a genocide. The move is both timel...

Training the Force of the Future: Calian and ADGA Align to Deliver Next-Generation Land Simulation for the Canadian Army

In a defence environment defined by digital acceleration, cyber integration, and multi-domain competition, readiness is no longer built solely on physical manoeuvre. It is forged in data-rich, synthetic environments that replicate the pace, complexity, and uncertainty of modern warfare. On February 26, 2026, Calian Group Ltd. and ADGA Group Consultants Inc. announced a three-year collaboration agreement to explore the development of next-generation integrated land training and simulation for the Canadian Army . The agreement formalizes a partner framework that aligns complementary expertise and technologies to meet the accelerating operational demands of Canada’s land forces—and the evolving realities of modern conflict. At its core, the collaboration is about ensuring that soldiers train in environments that mirror how they will actually fight. Training for the Modern Battlespace Today’s operational environment is digitally enabled, cyber-integrated, and multi-domain. Advantage ...

Sideline Conversions 2 March (some rugby news and information to start the week)

Action from the Academy Series at Massey on Saturday. Photo: Andy McArthur. Club Rugby pre-season starts this coming weekend. The summer is almost over and with it games below include (but not limited to in case there’s more on we don’t know about): Paraparaumu v Pōneke, Soldier Field Paraparaumu Northern United v Marist St Pat’s,...