A modern Tower of Babel? Pope Leo XIV warns against artificial intelligence

Pope Leo XIV has issued his first encyclical, titled *Magnifica Humanitas*, warning that artificial intelligence poses a major threat to humanity and could lead to a modern Tower of Babel. In the 43,000-word letter, he calls for disarming AI, establishing robust legal frameworks, and regulating tech giants like Meta. He also references Picasso's *Guernica* (1937) as a prophetic work denouncing dehumanization, alongside Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the novel *Schindler's List*. Separately, the Vatican is expanding its contemporary art program, with a new space called Conciliazone 5 currently showing works by British artist George Rouy, and future exhibitions planned for Yan Pei-Ming and Vivian Suter.

‘Writing is exactly like love – you need to do it in the dark’: novelist Leila Slimani on why literature is erotic

French-Moroccan novelist Leïla Slimani discusses her residency at Madrid's Museo del Prado, where she draws inspiration from Francisco Goya's Black Paintings for her writing. She reflects on her career, including winning the Prix Goncourt for her novel *Lullaby*, her appointment by French President Emmanuel Macron as a representative for Francophone culture, and the personal trauma of her father's imprisonment that fueled her early writing. The article explores her views on literature, painting, and the erotic nature of writing.

A pop-up hotel format is born that focuses on culture: starting in an architecture in Arles, France (with photos by Carla Sozzani)

Nasce un format di hotel pop up che punta sulla cultura: si inizia in un’architettura di Arles in Francia (con le foto di Carla Sozzani)

Luca Pronzato, founder of the pop-up restaurant platform We Are Ona, is launching a new itinerant hospitality concept called Casa Ideale. The first edition will take place from July 1–10, 2026, at Villa Bank, a 1970s villa near Arles, France, designed by Emile Sala and protected as a Remarkable Contemporary Architecture by the French Ministry of Culture. Guests will stay in the villa and dine at a restaurant run by chef Gil Nogueira, while the space also hosts a photography exhibition titled "Prologo" curated by Maddalena Scarzella for Fondazione Sozzani, featuring over 60 works from Carla Sozzani's archive by artists such as Urs Lüthi and Helmut Newton, alongside design pieces from the gallery Downtown+ by Luna Laffanour.

How Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons captured America: ‘One of our nation’s greatest journalists’

A new biography titled "Trudeau & Doonesbury: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art" by Joshua Kendall explores the life and career of Garry Trudeau, creator of the long-running comic strip Doonesbury. Published on Tuesday, the book is the first major biography of Trudeau, who won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning and whose characters age and evolve over 56 years, unlike those in other iconic strips. Kendall, a Yale alumnus, conducted original interviews and examined thousands of archival documents, though Trudeau—known for his reclusive nature—only agreed to limited email exchanges and some interviews, making the book unauthorized.

Jackson Pollock Transformed American Art—and Was Destroyed by His Own Success

The article traces Jackson Pollock's transformative yet destructive rise to fame, focusing on his move to East Hampton with Lee Krasner, his development of drip painting in a small unheated barn, and the influence of predecessors like Janet Sobel and Max Ernst. It details his 1948 debut at the Betty Parsons Gallery, the mocking 1949 Life Magazine feature that ironically catapulted him to celebrity, and photographer Hans Namuth's documentation of his process, which revealed the deliberate nature of his technique.

Stripteases, ecstatic embraces and a dog in a dress: the full-on photos celebrating queer dancefloors worldwide

A new photo book titled *Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife*, edited by writer Amelia Abraham, collects photographs from the 1960s to today that document queer nightlife around the world. The anthology features works by artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Sunil Gupta, Kia LaBeija, Phyllis Christopher, Roxy Lee, Ajamu X, and Del LaGrace Volcano, alongside images from trans community archives in Mexico City and Buenos Aires. The book is organized into sections on sex, clubs, and dissent, and includes a range of media from film stills to a Grindr screenshot, aiming to capture the messy, sexy, and politically charged atmosphere of queer social spaces.

Steven Soderbergh, the Colors of Money

Steven Soderbergh, les couleurs de l’argent

Steven Soderbergh's new film "The Christophers" (2025) is a sharp, chamber-piece drama about art, inheritance, and money. The story follows Julian Skar, a former art superstar from the 1970s now living in seclusion and earning a living by caricaturing himself on social media. His children, Barnaby and Sally, eager to maximize their future inheritance, hire a repentant forger named Lori Butler to secretly complete Julian's unfinished masterpiece, an eight-portrait series titled "The Christophers." The film explores the complex relationships that develop between the four characters in a labyrinthine London house, written in the style of a lively theatrical play.

From an Artist to His Dealer

D’un artiste à son marchand

A new book titled "Miró-Loeb. Correspondance. 1926-1936" has been published by Éditions Norma, presenting the previously unpublished correspondence between Spanish painter Joan Miró and his Parisian dealer Pierre Loeb from 1926 to 1936. The volume includes photographs, reproductions of artworks, an illustrated record of Miró's exhibitions at Galerie Pierre, a prologue by art historian Joan Punyet Miró (the artist's grandson), and contributions from Albert Loeb (Pierre's son) and Sonia Loeb (his granddaughter), contextualizing a decade of exchanges amid cultural ferment and rising tensions. The book also features sparser letters from 1945 until Loeb's death in 1963, tracing the evolution of their relationship.

Books received from November 7, 2025 to May 27, 2026

Ouvrages reçus du 7 novembre 2025 au 27 mai 2026

La Tribune de l'Art has published a roundup of art books received between November 7, 2025, and May 27, 2026, covering medieval to 17th-century art. Highlights include exhibition catalogues for Martin Schongauer at the Musée du Louvre, a unicorn-themed show at the Musée de Cluny, and a display of Renaissance Limoges enamels at Galerie Kugel. Scholarly works on Michelangelo's sculptures, Caravaggio's early career, and Georges de La Tour are also featured, alongside a volume on Romanesque and Gothic architecture in the Creuse region.

The New Generation of Berlin Curators: Independent Laboratory or New Establishment

La nuova generazione dei curatori di Berlino: laboratorio indipendente o nuovo establishment

The article examines the shift in Berlin's contemporary art curation landscape, focusing on a new generation of curators who are more pragmatic and operational than their predecessors. Figures like Anna Gritz at Haus am Waldsee, Lisa Long at Julia Stoschek Foundation, and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung—who moved from independent space Savvy Contemporary to lead Haus der Kulturen der Welt—exemplify this change. The piece argues that Berlin's art ecosystem has evolved from a low-pressure experimental zone into a competitive, almost corporate environment where curators must act as project managers, fundraisers, and cultural mediators.

The Enigmatic Youth

Der rätselhafte Jüngling

Artist Danh Vo reflects on the enigmatic "Ephebe of Mozia," an ancient Greek statue housed at the Museo Giuseppe Whitaker on the island of Mozia off Sicily's west coast. Vo describes the sculpture as a work of timeless beauty, marked by fractures, mysteries, and surprising sensuality, and recounts the difficulty of reaching the remote museum location.

A Bigflo et Oli video shot in front of a giant Picasso at the Abattoirs in Toulouse

Un clip de Bigflo et Oli tourné devant un immense Picasso aux Abattoirs de Toulouse

French rap duo Bigflo et Oli filmed a live session of their song "Picasso" in front of Pablo Picasso's monumental stage curtain "La Dépouille du Minotaure en costume d'Arlequin" (1936) at the Abattoirs museum in Toulouse. The video, directed by Antoine Zago-Honnorat, features nine musicians and draws on Latin and Spanish pop influences, with the duo citing inspiration from Spanish artist Rusowsky. The choice of venue is personal: the brothers grew up visiting the museum, and Oli co-curated an exhibition there in 2024–2025 titled "Le Musée imaginaire d'Oli," which attracted over 100,000 visitors.

Book reveals how Chintz—India’s precious textile pattern—became a precolonial global export

A new book titled *Chintz: Indian Cotton Textiles from the Karun Thakar Collection* explores the history of chintz, a block-printed Indian textile pattern that was traded globally for over a thousand years before European colonialism. Based on one of the world's largest textile collections, the volume features essays by 12 scholars and traces how these intricately designed cloths traveled to Japan, Indonesia, France, and Britain, influencing local fashions and sparking cross-cultural exchange. The book highlights the challenges of studying textiles from oral societies, where makers remain unnamed and many pieces have not survived.

Tourism and Accessibility: Travel is for Everyone. A New Issue of the Pax Newsletter is Coming, Subscribe for Free

Turismo e accessibilità: il viaggio è per tutti. È in arrivo un nuovo numero della newsletter Pax, abbonarsi è gratis

The article announces an upcoming issue of Pax, a newsletter by Artribune focused on cultural tourism. The new issue, arriving Friday, May 29, explores accessibility in travel and cultural tourism, featuring an interview with Anna Rizzo, author of "I paesi invisibili" (2022), and highlighting organizations like Traveleyes and NoisyVision, the latter founded in 2011 by Dario Sorgato to make nature exploration accessible to people with sensory disabilities. It also includes a map for outdoor leisure combining art, recreation, and nature at Italian villa parks, museums, and art centers, along with curated itineraries, trekking updates, cultural initiatives, and hospitality projects—including one by Michelangelo Pistoletto.

Two Venezuelan boys in a forest full of vultures: Silvana Trevale’s best photograph

Silvana Trevale recounts the story behind her photograph of two Venezuelan brothers on a beach in Playa Medina, taken in 2018. The image, captured on a Mamiya camera during a goodbye trip with friends who were about to leave the country, shows the boys returning from a fishing trip with their father. Trevale, who left Venezuela in the mid-2010s to study at Huddersfield University, describes the surreal setting of a beach with Japanese forest grass and vultures, and how the photograph became the starting point for her decade-long project "Venezuelan Youth."

Film and Documentary Planned About Louvre Art Heist

Film und Doku zum Kunstraub im Louvre geplant

A heist at the Louvre in October 2025, in which four masked thieves stole crown jewels worth an estimated €88 million, is being turned into a film and documentary series. The projects are based on the investigative book "Main basse sur le Louvre" by journalists Jean-Michel Décugis, Jérémie Pham-Lê, and Nicolas Torrent. The feature film will be directed by Romain Gavras, with production by Iconoclast, while a documentary series will be produced by Misfits of the Mediawan Group. The book was published on Wednesday by Flammarion, though no title, release date, or cast for the film has been announced yet.

The mural project honouring the Black cultural heritage of Rio de Janeiro – photo essay

Two Black men, Pedro Rajão and Fernando Sawaya, created the NegroMuro (BlackWall) mural project in Rio de Janeiro in 2018 to address the severe underrepresentation of Black figures in the city's public monuments. Of Rio's roughly 360 statues and busts, fewer than 10% depict Black people. The project now comprises 80 murals across the city, portraying about 120 Black individuals—including writer Machado de Assis, activist Lélia Gonzalez, and musician Luiz Melodia—on walls of schools, museums, train stations, and private homes. The murals are concentrated in the less touristy north zone, deliberately focusing on underserved neighborhoods. The project was recently recognized by law as part of Rio's intangible cultural heritage.

Director’s Notes with Andrea Yu-Chieh Chung | “José de Jesús Rodríguez’s Back & Forth”

Director Andrea Yu-Chieh Chung reflects on filming artist José de Jesús Rodríguez during a period of transition following his first solo show in New York. The film, titled "José de Jesús Rodríguez’s Back & Forth," was shot over four seasons and captures the artist experimenting with new materials and grappling with themes of oscillation between family responsibility, community connection, and artistic defiance.

Provincial Cosmos. Interview with Serena Fineschi, the artist who turned off all the lights of Siena

Provincia Cosmica. Intervista a Serena Fineschi, l’artista che ha spento tutte le luci di Siena

Serena Fineschi, an artist from Siena, Italy, discusses her return to her hometown after twelve years abroad, primarily in Brussels. She reflects on her public art projects, including one where she turned off all the city's lights for three minutes without warning, and another titled "Assistere il buio." The interview explores how her time in Belgium reshaped her artistic vision, shifting her perspective from the golden light of Siena to the sharp contrasts of northern light.

5 Artists Inspired by Moroccan Rugs and North African Weaving

Artsy Editorial profiles five contemporary artists from the Maghreb region who draw inspiration from Moroccan rugs and North African weaving traditions. The article highlights how these artists transform the loom-based craft—historically dismissed as "womanly craft" by academia and the avant-garde—into a contemporary art form that honors and updates longstanding weaving practices. Each artist uses the grammar of signs, stitches, rhythm, color, and designs inherent to North African textiles to articulate narratives and philosophies.

Co-Curated Biennials Are Rarely Harmonious. Why Not Embrace This?

The article explores the inherent tensions and conflicts that arise in biennials curated by multiple individuals, arguing that such friction is often seen as a flaw but could instead be embraced as a creative strength. It examines how co-curation can lead to disjointed or contradictory exhibitions, yet suggests that these very qualities reflect the complexity of contemporary art and society.