All posts tagged: Contemporary

How robots learn: A brief, contemporary history

How robots learn: A brief, contemporary history

Published by skeptic

That has changed. The machines are yet unbuilt, but the money is flowing: Companies and investors put $6.1 billion into humanoid robots in 2025 alone, four times what was invested in 2024.  What happened? A revolution in how machines have learned to interact with the world.  Imagine you’d like a pair of robot arms installed in your home purely to do one thing: fold clothes. How would it learn to do that? You could start by writing rules. Check the fabric to figure out how much deformation it can tolerate before tearing. Identify a shirt’s collar. Move the gripper to the left sleeve, lift it, and fold it inward by exactly this distance. Repeat for the right sleeve. If the shirt is rotated, turn the plan accordingly. If the sleeve is twisted, correct it. Very quickly the number of rules explodes, but a complete accounting of them could produce reliable results. This was the original craft of robotics: anticipating every possibility and encoding it in advance. Around 2015, the cutting edge started to do things …

2026 Contemporary Art Biennale: Lebanon’s art, old and new – arts24

2026 Contemporary Art Biennale: Lebanon’s art, old and new – arts24

Published by Sam Flores

Nabil Nahas has been painting for seven decades. From his childhood in Lebanon to his career in New York, he is now presenting his latest monumental work in Venice as his country’s representative at the 2026 Contemporary Art Biennale. The artist speaks to us about his connection to the ancient civilisations of his homeland, and why he believes politicising international platforms is the wrong approach. We also take a tour of a new exhibition exploring millennia of diverse civilisational influences on Byblos, as the Arab World Institute in Paris shines a spotlight on the Lebanese port city’s rich cultural heritage. Source link

San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum Plans to Sell Building

San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum Plans to Sell Building

Published by José Betancourt

The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco announced this week that it will look to sell its building in the city’s Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood, which also includes some of the city’s other top cultural organizations. The decision to sell is part of “a series of strategic steps to ensure a sustainable and impactful future for The Museum,” according to a release, which includes stabilizing the organization’s finances and ensuring that its endowments are not drained. The release also noted that this “new vision” for the CJM will allow for “greater flexibility and ensure a viable operating model.” Related Articles Founded in 1984, the CJM has been closed to the public since December 2024, and in those 15 months it has reduced its operating budget from $7.5 million to $3 million, allowing it to reduce its debt by half to under $14 million, according to a report by the San Francisco Chronicle, which first reported the news. Its closure also saw a pause in the museum’s programming and a reduction in its staff by …

Contemporary Art Market Cools as Old Masters and Impressionists Rebound

Contemporary Art Market Cools as Old Masters and Impressionists Rebound

Published by José Betancourt

For much of the past decade, the art market behaved as though history had stopped. Collectors and speculators chased the wet paint with missionary zeal, convinced that the next studio visit might yield a future masterpiece (or a tidy return when flipped onto the secondary market). Auction houses obliged, turning evening sales into pageants for artists who barely had time to form a reputation. That fever appears to have broken, according to the latest Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report, written by economist Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics. While the global art market returned to modest growth last year, reaching an estimated $59.6 billion in sales—a 4 percent increase after two years of decline—auction sales of postwar and contemporary art have continued to fall. Those categories generated $4.5 billion last year, compared with $8.5 billion in 2021. Related Articles Despite four consecutive years of decline, postwar and contemporary art remains the largest segment of the auction market, underscoring how central it has become to the trade over the past two decades. For a decade, …

Call the Midwife writer teases “more contemporary” project

Call the Midwife writer teases “more contemporary” project

Published by Daniella Wilson

Aside from a couple of other projects, Call the Midwife has been Heidi Thomas’s life since 2012 when it first debuted on the BBC – but also long before that, when she first began immersing herself in the memoirs of nurse and midwife Jennifer Worth. But while there’s a prequel and a movie on the way, plus a 16th season beyond that (although it’ll be quite some before its premiere), the end is now within sight as times change in Poplar. So naturally, Thomas has allowed her mind to meander elsewhere. “I am working on something more contemporary later this year,” she said at the Radio Times Covers Party 2026. “My main preoccupation at the moment is the Call the Midwife prequel and film, but it will be nice to have something different in the mix.” Still, Thomas said she “passionately enjoy[s] historic storytelling” – though, she added wryly, the latest season of Call the Midwife is set in the 1970s, “which I remember”. Read more: “So it’s actually quite painful thinking that is also …

Christie’s Takes 5 M. from Modern and Contemporary Sale in London

Christie’s Takes $265 M. from Modern and Contemporary Sale in London

Published by José Betancourt

This week has shown that there’s still a lot of money sloshing around London’s art market; Christie’s three-pronged 21st/20th century evening sale on Thursday took £197.5 million ($265 million), one day after Sotheby’s modern and contemporary auction brought £131 million ($175 million). The result marked a 52 percent increase on the house’s equivalent sale last year, achieving a 96 percen sell-through rate by lot and 98 percent by value. There were also new artist records set for Henry Moore, Toyen, and Dorothea Tanning. Four works by Cecily Brown, Bridget Riley, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach were withdrawn before kick-off, and carried a collective high estimate of nearly £17 million.  Christie’s sales–21st/20th century, “The Art of the Surreal,” and “Modern Visionaries  – The Roger and Josette Vanthournout Collection” (in that order)—felt like a slog at times, with 90 odd lots sold in nearly four hours. But both houses’ results countered the recent narrative that London’s status as a cultural powerhouse was on the slide. Rich people are still spending big here, despite the Labour government scrapping …

David Hockney to Paint Window Installation at Turner Contemporary

David Hockney to Paint Window Installation at Turner Contemporary

Published by Jenni Sidey

This spring, David Hockney will unveil a major new work at Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK, as part of the gallery’s 15th-anniversary celebrations. The piece, a massive 22-by-32-foot installation, will transform the museum’s floor-to-ceiling window in the Sunley Gallery overlooking Margate’s beaches and the North Sea. Running from April 1 to November 1, the window work depicts a sunrise in Normandy, based on an iPad painting Hockney created in 2020. Clarrie Wallis, the director of Turner Contemporary, said in a statement that “illuminated at night, the work becomes a point of light on the seafront.” Related Articles Turner Contemporary, which opened in 2011 and welcomed over 322,000 visitors in the 2023-24 year, is inspired by the life and work of JMW Turner. Hockney has said he draws inspiration from the iconic landscape painter; back in 2007, the Bradford-born artist co-curated an exhibition of Turner’s watercolours at Tate Britain. Hockney fever shows no sign of slowing down in the UK. Next month, London’s Serpentine Galleries opens its first-ever show by the octogenarian artist from March 12 …

Lauren Haynes Appointed Executive Director of Atlanta Contemporary

Lauren Haynes Appointed Executive Director of Atlanta Contemporary

Published by José Betancourt

Atlanta Contemporary has named Lauren Haynes’s as its new executive director, effective March 16. She replaces interim ED Everett Long, who had been in the position since last summer. Haynes brings a wealth of curatorial experience to her new role, from institutions throughout the United States. She was most recently vice president of arts & culture and head curator at the Trust for Governors Island. Governors Island, in New York Harbor, has robust arts programming, including exhibitions, site-specific installations, residencies, and an art fair. Related Articles Before that, Haynes worked at the Queens Museum; Duke University’s Nasher Museum in Durham, N.C.; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Bentonville, Ark.; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She is also on the board of the Association of Art Museum Curators. In various roles over the past two decades, Haynes has curated exhibitions of work by artists like Tracey Rose, Lyle Ashton Harris, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alma Thomas, and Stanley Whitney. “Atlanta Contemporary’s dedication to championing artists, fostering creative experimentation, and ensuring that diverse perspectives …

ITV confirm “contemporary reimagining” of beloved detective series

ITV confirm “contemporary reimagining” of beloved detective series

Published by Daniella Wilson

ITV has confirmed that a “contemporary reimagining” of detective series Dalziel and Pascoe is being produced. Dalziel and Pascoe was a beloved crime drama which aired for 12 seasons from 1996 to 2007 on BBC One, starring Colin Buchanan and Warren Clarke. The series centres on the relationship between seasoned detective Dalziel, and the newly qualified, by-the-book DS Pascoe, based in the fictional town of Wetherton, Yorkshire. Although the pair often clash, both on a professional and personal level, Dalziel and Pascoe find that their differences is what makes them work so well together. Much to their surprise, each case seems to strengthen their relationship, and gradually they begin to form a formidable partnership. Dalziel and Pascoe. BBC The TV show is adapted from characters created by British crime writer Reginald Hill, who wrote 24 books about Dalziel and Pascoe over the course of his career. His first book was written in 1970 and the latest was published in 2009, just 3 years before his death. The new series has been commissioned by BritBox, with ITV’s …

Courtauld To Open Contemporary Art Galleries with Blavatnik Gift

Courtauld To Open Contemporary Art Galleries with Blavatnik Gift

Published by José Betancourt

London’s Courtauld Gallery, home to a storied collection including works by artists like Manet and van Gogh, will open two new galleries devoted to contemporary art at the museum’s recently refurbished campus at Somerset House. The galleries will be built with a Blavatnik Family Foundation gift of £10 million ($13.8 million). This brings recent support by the foundation to a total of £20 million ($27.5 million). The top-floor galleries, designed in the 18th century as a display space for the Royal Society, are expected to open in 2029.  “Sir Leonard and Lady Emily Blavatnik have been foundational supporters of the Courtauld for many years, and we are thrilled that they share our excitement about our expanded engagement with contemporary art,” Courtauld director Mark Hallett said in a statement. The foundation has long supported the institution, which named the Blavatnik Fine rooms after the family in 2021.  Related Articles The Courtauld reopened in 2021 after closing for a $28.4 million overhaul that took three years, supported by the Blavatniks along with money from the National Lottery Heritage …