On the first night of the Republican National Convention, I settled into a seat in the upper levels of Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum to watch the most incongruous political address of my life. The speaker was Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The subject was the betrayal of the American worker. The audience included many of the kinds of people he held responsible for that treachery.

O’Brien, whose union has not endorsed Donald Trump, started off nice but soon got angry. He slammed the “economic terrorism” of corporations firing employees who try to organize and attacked business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce. As he worked further into his list of grievances, the applause grew more and more tepid, until it finally just seemed to stop. Trump and his newly announced running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio—whom O’Brien singled out for praise for having recently walked a picket line—stood politely throughout. Occasionally, the former president turned to his would-be vice president, cracked a joke, and smiled.

If you suspended your skepticism for a moment, it looked like a glimpse of the anti-corporate, anti-elite Republican Party that Vance, a self-styled spokesman of “forgotten” people, has promised to usher in. Then I checked my notifications and found the Republican Party that Vance more concretely represents. Around the same time O’Brien took the stage, another figure who has historically shied away from events like the RNC was shaking up the race in his own unprecedented way: The Wall Street Journal reported that one of the world’s richest union-busters, Elon Musk, was planning to donate $45 million a month to a super-PAC supporting the Republican campaign. 

The Republican convention was defined by the basic tension between the image Trump sought to project and the purpose his candidacy ultimately serves. In many ways, some cosmetic and others not, it was a far different event than any Republican convention in memory. The gathering offered a glimpse of a potentially unbeatable electoral coalition this November—a unified MAGA movement that’s making inroads with Black men, Latino voters, Gen Z, and union members. Republicans were expanding the tent by granting admittance to anyone who shared their antipathy to migrants, pronouns, and $5 gas. Vance, a Never Trumper–turned–MAGA heir, was a symbol of that vibe shift, promising an ideological realignment built to last. But his star turn in Milwaukee suggested a different story, one that might sound less like O’Brien and more like Musk. It was not the rise of the workers. It was the restoration of the bosses.

Former president Donald Trump walked out onto the floor at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night with a raised fist and a still-bandaged ear, a reminder of the assassination attempt he survived last week.

As he drew a standing ovation from the nearly 2,500 GOP delegates, a rendition of the hit-song “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” reverberated through Fiserv Forum arena.

Man thinks about our little bitty baby girls and our baby boys
Man made them happy, ’cause man made them toys
And after man make everything, everything he can
You know that man makes money, to buy from other man
This is a man’s world
But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing, not one little thing, without a woman or a girl.

It wasn’t just a catchy tune. Throughout four 14-plus hour days reporting at the Republican confab in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the music’s lyrics underscored the prevailing attitude on gender norms among the scores of GOP convention-goers I interviewed, the litany of speeches I tuned into, and the half a dozen issue-focused meetings I attended as a member of the media.

When Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak took the stage for the final talk on Wednesday at the Christie’s Art + Tech Summit, a sea of iPhones rose into the air to photograph tech’s living legend. And while Wozniak came off as the archetypal excitable inventor, he quickly bemoaned tech companies’ recent turn away from making reliable, problem-solving products. 

“I see two digital worlds,” Wozniak said. The first, he said, was the moment he came up in, dominated by the invention of new products people could buy. The second is the present, with its focus on endless updates and subscription plans. It’s perhaps no surprise then that Wozniak spoke fairly derisively about artificial intelligence, an ill-defined, hyped technology with vague applications that has nevertheless raked in hundreds of billions of dollars in private capital (as well as government subsidies) in the US alone, according to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

“I used to ride my bicycle over to the Stanford campus to watch a machine pick up a blue ball and put it into a blue box,” Wozniak said. “It only understood simple rules and now it understands more.” 

Wozniak openly struggled with the imbalance between the value of the new technology and the investment it has garnered, not to mention the high costs it incurs—and he wasn’t the only one at the conference to do so.

Though Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame said he made a nice chunk of change investing in NVIDIA, a leading AI company, he spent most of his talk focusing on buying watches, advertising on cable, and doing business in the UAE. When it comes to AI, O’Leary said, the industry is quickly approaching the “show me” phase and finding out that most of what hyped-up tech founders call AI is really just run-of-the-mill data mining and science. 

A union representing faculty and staff members at the University of the Arts has filed an unfair labor practices complaint against the Philadelphia art school, which abruptly shuttered earlier this summer.

The complaint, filed with the National Labor Relations Board, alleges that the school declined to “furnish information” following attempts the negotiate severance pay and other matters in the wake of the school’s closure this past June. News of the complaint was first reported by Artnet News on Thursday.

A representative for UArts did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.

This complaint comes as UArts faces another pending legal action: a class action lawsuit from nine employees who allege that the school broke the law by failing to provide 60 days’ notice, as is required for mass closures or layoffs of more than 100 people. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office and state officials have also said they are investigating the school.

Prior to its closure on June 7, UArts held a reputation as one of the nation’s most high-profile art schools. It had opened 148 years ago, and its list of alumni included Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Alex Da Corte, and Deborah Willis.

Turkish authorities have banned an exhibition that explores the art and history of the country’s transgender community, the Art Newspaper reported Thursday. Authorities shut down the exhibition, titled “Turn and See Back: Revisiting Trans Revolutions in Turkey,” by an order of a district governor who said the show “incited the public to hatred.”

“Turn and See Back” was staged at the non-profit space Depo Istanbul, which was established by Osman Kavala, a Turkish arts administrator who was arrested by the Turkish government in 2017 and placed in solitary confinement following accusations that he had helped fund terrorist groups and led an organization that supported the failed military coup in 2016.

Turkey’s right-wing populist president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s has long led a crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community, including blocking the Muslim world’s largest LGBTQ+ march, Istanbul Pride, since 2015 and labelling LGBTQ+ individuals as “deviants.” 

“Calling people ‘illegal’ is part of a process that now aims to dehumanize and criminalize LGBT+ people,” Jiyan Andiç, the show’s co-curator, told TAN. “This exhibition was a way of saying: ‘We are not a threat, perverts or groups managed from abroad, but we have always been here.’” Andiç emphasized that the exhibition aimed to humanize and represent the transgender community. Despite promoting the show mostly by word of mouth, it attracted hundreds of visitors. 

Depo Istanbul plans to appeal the ban, but said it remains doubtful of a successful reversal. The editor of the online art journal Argonotlar, Kültigin Kağan Akbulut, who has been tracking censorship in Turkey, told the Art Newspaper that the show’s cancellation was unique: the Turkish government hasn’t overtly banned an art show in at least a decade.

My father and O. J. Simpson were passing ships in red Corvettes in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Circa 1977, the sunroofs of their nearly identical luxury cars open for maximum exposure, they would wave to one another like carnival jesters, my sister in the back seat squeamish at the irony, their white wives occupying the front seats in a Siamese dream, twin stars in the fantasy no one is aware of until it arrives in images. Such gestures were the requisite scenic signifiers for that era of post–New Negro black entertainers faced with the hedonism of psychedelia, blaxploitation, and the amphetamined economy of the Reagan years. They were transitioning from taboos to tabloids to well-adjusted, literal tokens, having made it to some sense of after all or ever after in a fairy tale blurring the wasteland upheld by the lucky-bland amusements of almost-suburbanites. Unkempt and illicit ambitions were their freedom and retribution.

My father earned his living writing love songs that were ventriloquized by pop stars and peers such as Ray Charles; he agonized over the banality of spectacle in lyrics that rendered the banal uplifting. O. J. cradled footballs and ran very fast when chased, bowlegged, baffled at his own momentum. He accrued enough of it to become the first black athlete to garner corporate endorsements from companies like Hertz. He’d open in the typical format of vintage commercials, by reciting semi-didactic pleasantries as adspeak. Then he’d embody his embargoed alter ego, his own personal starship and space shuttle, and ramp up to cinematic sprinting through an airport terminal, wearing a three-piece suit and landing in a hideous car that made the Corvette with the top down seem like an inaccessible yearning, all while maintaining the plastic smile of a catalogue model. O. J.’s sad and vaguely distracted gaze revealed a self-deprecating narcissism contracted during the transition from being bullied as a child to outrunning everyone and every limitation he’d ever known. This was before it was acknowledged that the cerebrum of football players and boxers are often severely damaged and inflamed by the time they retire—and likely throughout their careers—in ways that can trigger bouts of rage, dementia, confusion, memory lapse, erratic dissociation. The talent, the miracle of divine intervention, that grants them access to white America’s lifestyle, in turn holds them hostage in pathologized exceptionalism. This makes it easier to understand the fatigued and dejected glaze over O. J.’s gaze as a mask dressing a festering internal wound.

My father’s gaze was similar, confident but strained and distant, almost plaintive. He’d spent some years as a welterweight boxer, which may or may not have contributed to his struggle with bipolar disorder and the constancy of lithium prescriptions of varying strengths—pharmaceutical cocktails, which, in addition to tempering his mood swings, siphoned the vigor from him, bending his will toward a docility more unnerving than rage. O. J’s double consciousness remained slicker and more protected; he made his icy sublimated anger into his signature charm even as it remained in part involuntary. As I write this, O. J.’s remains are being cremated in Las Vegas, and scientists have requested the opportunity to examine his brain for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The Simpson family is refusing. O. J. himself was convinced that he did suffer a level of chronic swelling consistent with the condition and severe enough to compromise his cognition and memory. There is no logical way to deny his intuition about this, considering the length of his career (he spent eleven years in the NFL and was a collegiate player before that) and the minimal number of blows to the head required to trigger a lifetime of chronic swelling. While considering O. J. and my father as twin victims of their own ambitions, I wonder how many blows to the skull, how many subtle fractures my father endured, and would I want to look inside and see the tissues ballooning for myself, would I allow doctors to dissect his brain for proof or defer to suspicion and leave space for the sacred/sacrosanct black-and-blank mystery of our destiny? I can’t be sure.

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THE HEADLINES

PEEKABOO. A self-portrait of the coal miner artist Norman Cornish has been rediscovered on the reverse of one of his crowded pub scenes, reports The Art Newspaper. The hidden picture features a grimy young man with tousled hair. Cornish, born in 1919 in county Durham, UK, was described as “the last of the pitman painters” when he died in 2014, although by then he had long since become sufficiently famous and prosperous to leave the mines, work full time as an artist, and be awarded an MBE. The undated self-portrait features on the back of the obviously later Bar Scene, on loan from the Durham County Council collection to an exhibition opening this week at the Bowes Museum, County Durham. It was discovered during conservation work at the museum. It had never been shown to the public before.

TEN THOUSAND THUNDERING TYPHOONS. Tintin is the hero of a series of 24 comic albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, aka Hergé. Artist Xavier Marabout (b. 1967) has landed himself in legal trouble after painting the character hitting on a pin-up girl, reading a gay magazine, transporting a chick in a garter belt on his motorcycle, not to mention other unexpected scenarios. Almost 40 of his acrylic paintings were taken to court by the Tintinimaginatio company, which manages the commercial exploitation of Hergé’s work, and condemned as counterfeits by the Rennes Court of Appeal. Marabout is known for mixing cultural references, from cartoon characters to the subjects of great masters. In one of his compositions, for instance, Tex Avery’s libidinous Wolf meets naked women painted in the style of Picasso.

THE DIGEST

Stars of a stomach-churning film discuss risking life and limb for 'art'

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Millions of low-income households are at risk of having their power disconnected this summer, exacerbating the risk of deadly heat as the climate crisis drives up temperatures.

A new report by the Centre for Energy Poverty and Climate (EPC) and the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada) found that almost half of Americans live in states without rules restricting disconnections for unpaid or overdue energy bills during potentially deadly heatwaves, forcing some low-income families to choose between cooling their homes and paying rent.

It comes as large swaths of the midwest and eastern US remain under heat advisories amid sweltering temperatures and humidity caused by a slow-moving area of high pressure, which brought misery across the west and south-west last week.

There is an affinity between trees and bodies held in the language of limbs. This affinity is what makes the soft folds of pastel-colored fabric in Tamara Kostianovsky’s sculptures—life-sized trunks splayed across the gallery floor, innards exposed—so quietly disturbing. The title of her exhibition at Paris’s Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, “Nature Made Flesh,” underscores this parallel of extremities. Citing the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “flesh of the world,” which posits an elemental matrix bodily and worldly matter, Kostianovsky probes a corporeal way of being in the world, one she witnessed firsthand as a child in her father’s surgical practice. Describing an early familiarity with blood, fat, and skin, the artist transforms fabric into flesh and uses that flesh to sculpt a fantastical world. The effect can be whimsical, as in her array of fabric mushrooms that spread across a tree stump pinned to the wall. Incorporating black fabric into a number of pieces, referencing recent forest fires and their attendant burning and decay, Kostianovsky signals that her world is not entirely separate from our own.

Though Kostianovsky’s sculptures are made from discarded textiles, they nonetheless have the clean, sweet softness of freshly tumbled laundry. She cites the origins of her practice in an accidentally shrunken garment. Some of her pieces are made of her father’s clothes, invoking the lingering intimacy that comes from a textile’s proximity to the body. The exhibition program calls this “upcycling,” but it’s much more than a useful convenience or a signal of sustainability: feeling the echo of a T-shirt’s wearer in the veining of a tree reminds us of the interconnectedness of our material world.

In other sculptures, however, Kostianovsky pushes against the softness of her chosen medium. A series of carcasses titled “Tropical Abattoir,” (2019–23), hung as if in a meat locker, couple the excruciating detail of caricature with the bright color of cartoons. Made from upholstery fabric, the stuffed skins have a homey familiarity that makes the violence of their presentation all the more jarring.

Emerging from exaggerated ribs are rare birds made of equally vibrant fabrics, a combination of life and death that Kostianovsky calls “tropical abattoir” in reference to her upbringing in Argentina. The work hangs in canny dialogue with the museum’s collections: an 18th-century still life on the opposite wall is a reminder that flayed flesh has long been a subject of art. Housed in a 17th-century mansion filled with both period pieces and artefacts of the history of hunting, the museum relies on a robust program of contemporary art to generate critical reflection on the relationship between humans and nature.

What is the upshot of seeing the world as flesh? Kostianovsky’s work suggests embodied entanglement can be a means of repairing a colonialist approach to nature, especially when surrounded by reminders of extractive exoticism fashionable amongst the European aristocrats who would have been the original inhabitants of the museum’s opulent rooms. Her “Foul Decorations” (2020) series hews most closely to the lavish style of the French Rococo. The series is modeled on wallpaper featuring tropical flora and fauna—often including imaginary birds—that was designed to transport its beholders to an elusive paradise underwritten by the insidious work of colonialism. In Kostianovsky’s recreation, three-dimensional fabric birds “invade” the space, taking over the walls and by extension, the environment. Based on indigenous rather than imaginary fowl, Kostianovsky’s work offers the birds a kind of homecoming, returning them to their native environments. Given a dimensionality absent in the original wallpaper, the birds sound an ultimately optimistic note. While the show does not shy away from representing decay and destruction, the irrepressible vibrancy of Kostianovsky’s work conjures a world that feels vividly alive.