The best artwork this week is not hanging in a museum or a blue-chip gallery; it’s a mock street ad showing Jeffrey Epstein wearing Meta’s new AI-powered Ray-Bans with the slogan “glasses for people who don’t do consent.”
In case you didn’t know, these glasses can photograph and record you without permission. Just when you think you can’t resent Meta any more than you already do, Mark Zuckerberg reminds you that there’s a lot left to hate.
While Epstein burns in hell, Betye Saar, who passed away recently just days before her 100th birthday, is probably giving art workshops to angels in heaven. Our contributor Nereya Otieno got to speak with the assemblage artist in her final weeks at a show of her custom designs in Los Angeles.
And what’s a Tuesday without a good shipwreck story? Hundreds of nearly intact amphorae were found in a 2,000-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Sicily. What will we leave at the bottom of the ocean for future generations? Meta AI glasses?
—Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief
How Betye Saar Came to Be
There is an African Adinkra symbol, “Sankofa,” that means “go back and get it.” It’s intended to preach the importance of looking to the past when shaping the future, and to share wisdom between generations. On the occasion of her 100th birthday, Roberts Projects in Los Angeles organized an exhibition to recognize the earliest professional works of Betye Saar — the prolific assemblage artist who prodded the psyche of the Black American experience for over seven decades before her death last month. The show sheds light on a lesser-known facet of her canon: costume design.
Through the over 200 archival objects in the show, one gets a good sense of the multiple pots Saar had her fingers in at the beginning of her career. Costume design, dancing (a full-wall photo of a young dancing Saar acts as the exhibition greeter), photography, drawing, jewelry, garments, greeting cards, album covers, and more are on view. The range depicts Saar’s broad curiosities, but it also underlines her particular skill in identifying various potentials and fitting them together. | Nereya Otieno
The Bennett Prize Opens Fifth Call for Entries
Women figurative realist painters can enter to win $75,000 and a traveling solo exhibition. Applications are open through September 19.
News
- The National Gallery of Art is studying the possible impact of racecar vibrations on artwork ahead of Trump’s “Freedom 250 Grand Prix.”
- A new mock ad by the activism group Everyone Hates Elon depicts the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses on a photo of Jeffrey Epstein, overlaid with the statement, “Glasses for people who don’t do consent.”
- While exploring the warm waters of the Sicilian coast last week, two Italian divers discovered hundreds of clay vessels piled atop an approximately 2,000-year-old Roman shipwreck.
From Our Critics
Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s Fragments of Home
His fractured portraits at the National Public Housing Museum reckon with memory, family, and a childhood shaped by Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. | Lori Waxman
Member Comment
—Oletha DeVane on “The Lost Pearls of New York City“
From the Archive
The Miscarriage Collages That Were Too Much for the Art World
In 1974, the San Francisco Art Institute isolated Joanne Leonard’s series Journal of a Miscarriage from the rest of the works in her solo show. Has anything changed since? | Christine Hume
