Art vs AI

Plus: the world's best museum benches

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Tim Smith-Laing applauds Hito Steyerl's stylish polemic against AI

While Medium Hot does not trail its interest in AI on the cover (its title is a nod to Marshall McLuhan's designation of television as a 'cool medium'), AI is its central subject. At its heart is the question of what lies behind the AI-generated images that seem to be taking over the visual realm and how all that relates to a world in which 'heat' of one kind or another is increasing continuously.

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Ben Street's personal guide to the best museum benches

Museum seats – like museum cafes, cloakrooms, shops and toilets – may seem of less consequence than the artworks surrounding them, but they too can make all the difference between a one-time visit and the first of many. Seating says something: it announces that there are many ways of doing this. A room without seats is saying the opposite. At their best, museum seats invite slowness. Their perfect literary tribute, Thomas Bernhard's novel Old Masters (1985), features a man who sits at the same bench in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, for several hours every other day, staring (or not staring) at a painting he only somewhat likes: Tintoretto's Portrait of a Man with a White Beard (c. 1570). Most of the book is not about the painting. And most museum visits are not only about the art.

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Emma Crichton-Miller remembers the British potter Gordon Baldwin

Kirsten Tambling on the studied elegance of Antoine Watteau

Many of Watteau's loveliest drawings are currently on display in the Prints & Drawings Gallery at the British Museum. Earlier works, produced during Watteau's return to his native Valenciennes in 1709, show long-limbed soldiers moving with elegant insouciance; a red-chalk soldier proffering a tray of army rations like a snuff box. Back in Paris, one of the 'savoyardes' who frequented the city during the barren winter months emerges from gritty lines of brown. She sits at an urban street-corner with the distinctive wooden box that was instantly recognisable to every Parisian child. Inside was a marmot, which could be brought out, for a price. Watteau was always drawn to details of costume, and the headscarf, cane and thick practical shoes of the 'Savoyarde' are rendered with the same care he brought to the costumes of the bon ton. Those images of the refined life are, for many, his most familiar and there are plenty of them here: a young lady sits on the grass in a ruff and riding cloak from the previous century; a guitarist picks out a tune with his long fingers and sheets of anonymous women turn their exquisitely rendered heads towards something we cannot see.

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Susan Moore on the glorious contemporary art at Goodwood

Goodwood's new Art Foundation is nothing if not ambitious. Its catalyst was in part the closure in 2020 of the Cass Sculpture Foundation, a charity which had for nearly 30 years rented 26 acres of this historic Sussex estate for the commissioning and display of contemporary British sculpture. But it has also been a long-held desire of the current Duke of Richmond to set up a major not-for-profit at Goodwood and, as he told me a few weeks before the foundation's opening, to 'do something with contemporary art'.

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Gabriel Coleman reflects on John Piper's passion for tradition

Two key figures encouraged Piper to deepen his relationship with stained glass and even begin making his own designs. The first was John Betjeman, who Piper met in 1936. This began the incredibly productive working relationship of artist/photographer and writer in the Shell Guide series. Betjeman recalled Piper's remarkable energy, visiting more than 10 churches a day. He was always photographing, sketching, painting and discussing; this allowed his knowledge of medieval arts and architecture to transform from that of a cataloguer to the sensitive appreciation of a 'looker'. The seeds of an idea about not just recording these traditions but actually contributing to them began to take hold. The second was the stained-glass maker Patrick Reyntiens, who was introduced to Piper in the early 1950s through Betjeman's wife, Penelope.

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In the current issue…

Hettie Judah on the artists who have rejected the classical ideal

The cover of the first copy of this magazine carried the divine profile of the marble sculpture known as the Apollo Belvedere, a fitting motif for a mag that (at the time) covered both art and music. Question Apollo's musical supremacy at your peril – Marsyas paid for such hubris with his skin. Considered the epitome of male beauty, the god inspired the earliest nudes in Greek art. Sculptures of Apollo from the early fifth century BC mark the emergence of a physical ideal that would endure for thousands of years: a carapace of muscle cladding the torso that transitions into the legs through deep iliac furrows.

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