Art and the Homeless

How a New Princeton Study "Disproves" AI Self-Improvement Alarmism Synopsis: A recent study led by Princeton University researchers Peter Kirgis and Sayash Kapoor challenges the narrative that current AI systems are on the verge of recursive self-improvement and runaway superintelligence.  Published in August 2026, the research uses a method called "shadow evaluation" to test whether AI agents can conduct original, open-ended scientific research without human oversight. The study found that while AI agents mastered the engineering and coding tasks required for research, they fundamentally lacked curiosity and discernment needed for discovery.  While the study proves that recursive self-improvement is not possible with current technology, it leaves open future computing breakthroughs that might overcome these specific limitations. The findings suggest that AI progress is an incremental process gated by human oversight rather than an uncontrollable autonomous event. T...

The Weekend Read: What Macron's G7 Call Actually Signals For readers who missed the late edition Friday story (and are catching up), based on the OilPrice.com report published 4:00 PM CDT, Sept 18 (plus media reporting) the headline event is, in one paragraph: President Macron announced Friday he will convene G7 energy ministers "in the coming weeks" to coordinate stock levels, export cooperation, and production capacity — and to consider a second coordinated drawdown of emergency oil reserves.   The trigger: Saudi Aramco told at least two European refiners they will receive zero crude under term contracts in October, after drone strikes on September 11 knocked out three pumping stations on the East–West pipeline and disrupted loadings at the Red Sea port of Yanbu.   Aramco hopes to restore partial flow within days and full capacity in roughly six weeks, meanwhile it has rerouted about 60 million barrels through the Persian Gulf and ship-to-ship transfers off Sohar, Oman,...

French budget cuts, the mechanics of Article 49.3, and the potential for RN lawmakers to break ranks.  RN’s Strange Alignment Marine Le Pen has historically defended cultural exceptionism as part of national sovereignty, making her party an unlikely ally against cuts—complicating the government’s attempt to frame austerity as bipartisan. France is currently subsidizing an illusion of control. By using Article 49.3 and targeted cuts to force a budget through, the government is performing Bastiat’s "Should the State subsidize the arts?" backwards: it is taxing the future’s political capital to pay for today’s legislative survival.  Bastiat’s "Seen" is a passed budget; the "Unseen" is the erosion of the democratic consensus that makes budgets enforceable. The market, acting as the rational audience, realizes the show is being funded by debt it knows won't be repaid. Specific arts and cultural items are currently under discussion in the French political/ec...

The 2026 Michael Fried Interview ARTFORUM: Michael, your 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood" ignited a firestorm, defining the Minimalist crisis as theatricality, and championing the autonomy of modernist painting. Yet, the philosophical roots of that argument—specifically the concept of the fourth wall and the rejection of the beholder's presence—were not fully explicit in that text. It was only later, in your 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality, that you openly connected your critique to Denis Diderot. Why do you think it took two decades to articulate this lineage, and what did you miss in 1967 that you now see clearly? FRIED: That is a fair question, though I would not say I "missed" it in 1967 so much as I was groping toward a truth I didn't yet have the vocabulary to name. When I wrote Art and Objecthood, I had read scattered pieces of Diderot, certainly, but I had not yet realized the depth of the alignment between his eighteenth-century aesthetic phil...

The Inversion of Theatricality from Art Critique to Political Spectacle The paper traces the conceptual journey of the term "theatricality," originating in Michael Fried’s 1967 critique of Minimalism, where it functioned as a pejorative label for art that abandoned autonomous representation to acknowledge the viewer and the surrounding environment. Fried’s distinction between "absorption" (the intact fourth wall of self-contained drama) and "theatricality" (the breaking of the wall to address the beholder) established a hierarchy where the former was the ideal and the latter a corruption of artistic integrity. However, contemporary discourse has witnessed a radical inversion of this order: the mechanisms of the art world—specifically the "happening" and the self-conscious performance of Pop Art—have transformed into the primary lens through which all social reality is consumed. Today, legitimate political acts, such as street barricades and civil...

The Shadow Fleet: How Saudi Arabia is Quietly Outmaneuvering the Hormuz Crisis While mainstream news reports focus on standard supply chain disruptions, a fascinating and somewhat shadowy maritime workaround has been quietly operating since late August. To bypass the escalating dangers in the Strait of Hormuz without relying on vulnerable overland pipelines, Saudi Arabia has initiated a covert shuttle system that relies heavily on ship-to-ship (STS) transfers and stealth navigation. The Mechanics of the Dark Shuttle System  Rather than loading oil onto commercial tankers at ports, Saudi Aramco loads crude onto its own state-owned shuttle tankers inside the Persian Gulf. These shuttles then transit the highly dangerous Strait of Hormuz — with their AIS tracking transponders off — to remain undetected to hostile targeting systems. Once they safely exit into the Gulf of Oman, the shuttles drop anchor in designated zones at Sohar (Oman) or Fujairah (UAE). There, they moor alongside the...