It takes only a glance at my MSN (Microsoft Start) homepage to think that every day someone discovers something that forces us to rewrite the history of humanity. I imagine historians exasperated, stalled again and again on the first page.
One of those stories—always amusing—claims that 'a set of geometric markings engraved between 34,000 and 45,000 years ago on small sculptures and tools is forcing a revision of the history of human communication.'

Leafing through the fall issue of Art in America, a brief note caught my attention: the publication’s response to a complaint from an art curator at a prestigious museum, who argued that, however impressive his credentials might appear, his working life was little short of a sentence.

I had the opportunity to read, in the latest issue of The Critic, an article on Sancta, the most recent work by Austrian choreographer and director Florentina Holzinger, one of the most radical figures in the contemporary European scene. It takes as its point of departure Sancta Susanna (1921–22) by Paul Hindemith—already scandalous in its time—and expands it into a hybrid scene somewhere between opera, performance, concert, and a ritual of quasi-satanic affiliation.

When I was researching for my book La acera del sol: impactos de la política cultural socialista en el arte cubano 1961–1981, Professor Adelaida de Juan granted me an interview. We spoke for several hours, and among everything she told me, one remark stood out: for her, the most significant visual production of the 1960s had been neither painting, nor printmaking, nor photography, but graphic design—the posters produced by ICAIC, Casa de las Américas, and the National Council of Culture.

The winner of the 2026 London Camera Exchange (LCE) Photographer of the Year competition is a retired teacher who captured the award-winning image while on holiday in Southeast Asia. The scene was shot in Hoi An, on Vietnam’s central coast, as she photographed a fisherman at work. The author notes that the moment in question sealed the playful end of the encounter and helped her stand out among more than 14,500 participants.

Science is beginning to entertain the idea that human hypocrisy may derive directly from primates. Knowing this does not make it better or worse, but it is worth keeping in mind that the brain arrives already equipped for it.
Facial expressions sit at the very center of social life, and yet scientists still do not fully understand how the brain produces them.

Persistently, and since the most remote antiquity, the moon has acted as a trigger for the human imagination. It has agitated artists and writers, the deranged of every kind, poets, philosophers, spiritual beings, night wanderers—but above all, lovers. Perhaps because it casts that faint light which outlines the features of the desired body: the point of light, the delicate glimmer that ignites along the maiden’s lower lip...

There are artists whose work is born of skill; others, of obsession; others still, of a wound. In Aaron Kent, all three converge. His practice resists reduction to any single discipline or stable technique. Although it may be inscribed, under a taxonomic logic, within the territories of ceramics, printmaking, or sculpture, the truth is that his work moves through far more uncertain zones.

I cannot quite understand how Facebook’s algorithm works. For some reason, it has begun feeding me dozens of images of Ana de Armas. Perhaps because one day I lingered on a photograph of Anya Taylor-Joy; perhaps because I keep an archive—strictly for scientific purposes—of Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe; perhaps, in short, because I paused one second too long over a few of her images.

On my way home, on one of the trains at Miami Airport, I took this photograph. A passenger had left a sticker on one of the metal poles inside the carriage. Whoever it was—judging by the code—came from Guayaquil and carried it on their suitcase. The author, it would seem, now lives on these shores.

I have developed a faint affection for photography competitions. I go through them with an almost childish curiosity, looking for the good photographs the jury overlooked and the bad ones it chose to reward. In the latest issue of Camera Craft, its sixty-ninth, for March and April of this year, some of the results are published from the competition that The Guild of Photographers organizes annually.

There is, in underwater life, a captivating otherness, and these images from the Underwater Photographer of the Year competition bring it forth with admirable clarity.
The first photograph captures a clownfish parent keeping vigil over the moment when the eggs it had tended so carefully begin to hatch. A scene which, according to the judges, they had never encountered before...

Everyone in Cincinnati’s artistic community knows Katherine Hurley. They have for a long time. In my own case, for just under ten years. And we all know her solid career and her exceptional body of work, delicate and subtle as few others.
I have always found it difficult to comment on the genre of landscape. Not because I do not like it, but because, when it reproduces what nature itself has taken millennia of patient execution to achieve...

Dressed in red, barricaded behind a mask crowned with feathers as red as the dress itself, the visual artist Cirenaica Moreira (Havana, 1969) waited, seated on a stool, for the attendees of the performance—scissors in hand—to cut the hearts fastened to the dry, gilded branches she held.

Human genius can be observed in many of its works. Nowhere is it more detectable than in the arts: music, literature, and the visual arts. As a species, seen from above, we are all fairly clever. But some are—or were—truly exceptional. What did they require to rise above the rest? What made them singular, beyond the reasoning most of us share?