having our garden done, dinner and a movie, soup social, joan semmel, art after orban, MoMA PS1, AI unquestioned
yesterday i was grateful for progress on our garden project and seeing project hail mary with holly…
today i am looking forward to a costco run with holly…
i am, at this moment, wishing i had my headphones because of the loud talker chatting with her friend across the way… her friend has an annoying vocal fry too… i am struggling not to hear them and can’t… ah well, it’s a free coffee shop… i will remember to bring my headphones in future…
yesterday was pleasant… we met with One Nature, the company doing our landscape design and implementation… then we picked up clothing h was having altered at the seamstress, came home and putted around the house before going to see Project Hail Mary… it was my second time seeing it but i promised h that i would see it with her… i actually liked it better the second time around as i found it easier to let some of the logical inconsistencies slide and enjoy the burgeoning friendship (bromance?) between grace and rocky… it’s a bit of relief from the majority of depictions of first encounters which usually involve a great deal of violence… this one is cooperation from the start… with only a few moments of fear to be found…
after the movie we went to dinner at Wonder Bar for a latish dinner… h had the steak frits and i had oysters and the ramp and morel pasta dish… delish… as always… such a great thing to have an independent movie theater with a good restaurant attached to it…
i actually got to bed at a decent hour last night… will do again tonight as we have no where to be tonight…
tomorrow we have this month’s soup social installment, hosted at a friends house… we started these back in january as a simple way to entertain friends and be together with no agenda… h and i have a strong belief that face to face engagement with friends and family is especially important in the current drought political climate… it’s been a joy to have our friends want to become hosts… we started something!… i don’t think i have ever been part of starting something like this before…
some notable links that caught my attention this morning...
Joan Semmel: In the Flesh | The Jewish Museum
Spotlighting Semmel’s singular perspective, Joan Semmel: In the Flesh presents the artist’s iconic paintings and self-images alongside works from the Museum’s collection to explore parallel themes of the body, intimacy, and autonomy.
Joan Semmel: In the Flesh | The Jewish Museum
Dismantling Orbán's 16-Year Grip on Hungary's Art World
Despite this atmosphere of growing despair and apathy, a few initiatives managed to survive and occasionally even thrive, such as the OFF-Biennále Budapest, the country’s largest contemporary art event. Initially founded to provide a platform for grassroots, artist-run, independent projects, OFF operates free from state funding and the ties that come with it, relying instead on international and private support. Last year, OFF celebrated its 10th anniversary with its largest edition to date, brought to life by our team of 10 curators working outside the state apparatus. The biennale highlighted issues often overlooked by mainstream institutions, amplifying the voices of queer, Roma, immigrant, and other communities targeted by the government or that do not neatly fit into its utopia of a homogeneous, white, heteronormative Hungarian society.
Dismantling Orbán's 16-Year Grip on Hungary's Art World
MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” Is Gritty, Stunning, and Gutting Art Review
The survey, which happens every five years, rejects the out-of-towner’s glossy surfaces in favor of the view from inside.
Installation view of Greater New York 2026, with works by Covey Gong in foreground (all photos Hrag Vartanian/**Hyperallergic* *unless otherwise noted)
Yesterday, on a gorgeous, unseasonably hot spring afternoon, a squad of us descended on MoMA PS1 in Queens for the press preview of ~Greater New York~, which opens today, April 16. A survey of artists working and living in New York City, the quinquennial (that’s every five years) is back for the sixth time since its inception in 2000 — just in time for the museum’s 50th anniversary.
This iteration includes the work of more than 50 artists who are currently in what the museum calls the “formative years of their career.” It’s a snapshot not only of their individual trajectories, but of our great city as it continues to evolve in a time of deep anxiety and cautious hope. Read some of our first impressions of Greater New York 2026 below.
"Cognitive surrender" leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds
Experiments show large majorities uncritically accepting "faulty" AI answers.
“Lowering the threshold for scrutiny”
Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. The researchers say this “demonstrate[s] that people readily incorporate AI-generated outputs into their decision-making processes, often with minimal friction or skepticism.” In general, “fluent, confident outputs [are treated] as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the meta-cognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation,” they write.
i have been avoiding AI, not because i don't believe it could be useful technology, but because i don't believe the people in charge of it have anybody's interest at heart other than their own... i used to be an early adopter of technology, but the last 20 years of (mostly) techbros running amok have convinced me i should go analog as much as i can and focus on face to face interaction with my local community...
omg, these shoes, i wish i could find such a thing in my size...