Latest news with #DeStijl
The National
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Dubai AI Week hosts second Global Prompt Engineering Championship
The second Global Prompt Engineering Championship is under way in Dubai, bringing together top talent from around the world to compete for a Dh1 million ($272,290) prize pool. Organised by the Dubai Future Foundation and the Dubai Centre for Artificial Intelligence, the event is taking place on the sidelines of Dubai AI Week – a major platform showcasing the UAE's growing influence in AI. This year's championship has drawn participants from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Brazil, South Africa, Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait, Russia, Pakistan and India. The two-day competition, which began on Tuesday, highlights the global rise of prompt engineering – a skillset focused on crafting effective instructions for AI systems to generate precise, creative and context-aware outputs. In addition to the coding, literature and art categories from the inaugural competition, this year introduced a new video category, reflecting the increasing role of generative AI in multimedia content creation. 'Choosing video was an interesting one given how revolutionary AI has been with video generation over the past year,' Hamad Al Shirawi, director of Dubai AI Week, told The National. He said it was inspiring to observe how participants handled the pressure of the competition. 'It's really nice to be around them and see how each one of them is actually putting in their prompts in a very limited time, [it is] very stressful, being evaluated by these judges, actually producing meaningful outcomes – not just something that you and I can do quickly using one of the platforms,' he added. 'The championship is one of the activities that really looks at talent. It focuses on enabling the ecosystem and amplifying the opportunity. This only elevates, puts Dubai on the map and solidifies our position, but also attracts all these global names." Sufyan Al Hussein, a filmmaker competing in the art category, said the first round tested participants with an unexpected creative challenge. 'It was about creating an illusion and limiting us to only three colours – red, green and black. It was challenging, to be honest, but we tried to make it as artistic as possible,' he told The National. 'I do use AI sometimes, for example, when I want to generate my mood boards, my storyboards,' he said, adding that his knowledge of art history, from Rococo to De Stijl, helped to guide his approach. He said the registration process was simple and accessible. 'You sign up, you do a test, or I would say like a challenge, you submit it and then you wait,' he said. As he awaited the results of the second round, he remained hopeful. 'I think the second prompt will be easier because there is nothing harder than this. It was very hard, but I think we're doing amazing,' he said. 'I never thought of like winning the money itself. Maybe I want to feed my ego ... but I would reinvest it maybe also in some sort of AI service.' The championship is one of several anchor events during Dubai AI Week, an event that brings together government leaders, tech executives, researchers and creators to explore the future of AI. "This week is a culmination of our efforts ... bringing all of these events together gives more of a purpose, more of a well-rounded opportunity for people both based in Dubai and abroad to focus and capitalise on this week,' Mr Al Shirawi said. Other events taking place include the AI Retreat, the Dubai Assembly for Generative AI, the Dubai AI Festival and the Machines Can See summit. The week also features a school programme to engage 50 institutions across the UAE in AI-focused activities. The UAE, ranked among the top five countries globally for AI competitiveness, continues to build on its 2017 national AI strategy by investing in talent and creating platforms that encourage collaboration and innovation. The Global Prompt Engineering Championship exemplifies that mission – merging creativity, competition and cutting-edge technology to shape the next generation of AI leaders.
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The big idea: should we abolish art?
Some of us will go to an art gallery this weekend. Maybe it will help us reflect or inspire us. Isn't that part of a life well lived? And if you don't go to a gallery, maybe you'll find yourself lingering on a picture at home, reading a novel, going to the theatre or listening to music. But what if you didn't? What if there were no galleries, theatres, publishers or concert halls? What if we got rid of art? The impulse seems philistine at best, authoritarian at worst, yet a remarkable number of modern artists were seduced by it. André Breton, the leader of the surrealists, repeatedly called for the end of literature. Theo van Doesburg, the founder of the De Stijl movement, proclaimed that 'art has poisoned our life', while his friend and compatriot, Piet Mondrian, believed that if we did abolish art, no one would miss it. In December 1914, as the first world war entered its first winter, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky declared that art was already dead. 'It found itself in the backwater of life,' he wrote. 'It was soft and could not defend itself.' These points of view were rooted in a historical moment, particularly in the shock and disillusionment occasioned by the war, yet it's easy to see resonances in our own time. Many back then had a distrust of culture that was elite in the wrong way: expensive, inaccessible, obscure. If you've been to an art fair recently, you'll notice that this kind of art is in rude health. Characters such as Mondrian and Van Doesburg wished not to abolish creation or self-expression – but to break art out of its frame, to transfigure our whole environment so there would be no distinction between art and ordinary objects. The rise of modern design has perhaps brought us closer to that goal, yet Mondrian hoped that his own style, with its distinctive primary colors and geometric planes, would form the basis for a single, universal, anonymous language of design, and instead it has degenerated into Mondrian-kitsch, to be found on everything from socks to aprons. It seems as if we like designers more than design. The most intriguing of those old impulses to abandon art derived from suspicion of an art that was empathetic and humanistic. During the war, Breton had worked as a psychiatrist tending to traumatised soldiers, and these experiences made him wary of any art that might attempt to redeem all the horror they had witnessed. If the world was wretched, shouldn't we be transforming it, not distracting ourselves from it? Yet for most of us, that's precisely the role art plays in our lives. If you've had a bad week at work, you relax with art. It blunts your ire, and by Monday you're ready for the boss again. But what would happen if we didn't soothe ourselves with imagined utopias, but instead did as John Lydon once suggested, and used anger as an energy? It should be obvious that these early calls to end art didn't achieve their goals. Mondrian talked the talk about art's end, but his love of painting made him equivocate, and eventually he blamed society for being ill-prepared for his brave new artless world. Also, the proposed alternatives weren't always so viable. Among several ideas, Breton suggested walking in the city as a new form of poetic activity. He felt that a disjunctive kind of verse, a collage of sights and signs and feelings, would emerge from the chance encounters and lateral thoughts occasioned by a walk. Maybe it would if you were strolling through the historic parts of Paris in the 1920s, but when I tried wandering at random around my own neighbourhood in an outer borough of New York City, I found my 'poems' were banal and forlorn. I struggled to disengage from thoughts of goals and destinations, and crossing the busy street posed its own risks. I concluded that we partition our lives for a reason: we rationalise to get stuff done, we fantasise to relax. In other words, art and life don't mix. Recent developments suggest that artists agree. After a flurry of attempts to democratise art in the 1960s, things have quieted somewhat, and like a young radical entering middle age, art has grown conservative. While once we wanted avant-garde performance, or sculpture made of documents or heaps of dirt, today patrons want portraits once again. There's much to be said for the notion that art should consist of beautiful objects. In a world that is increasingly digital, dematerialised and accelerated, the pleasures of pausing and looking at something exquisite help us slow down and rest in the moment. Yet to accept that this is all art should aspire to is to accept that a whole realm of human creation devoted to beauty, thought and feeling will be confined to the boundaries of a picture frame or a plinth, and sold to the highest bidder. That is the sorry spectacle on show at most art fairs today, in which prestige attaches not to the experience of beauty, nor to public discourse about it, but merely to the acquisition of expensive trophies. So while calling for the end of art can sound like a mantra for hare-brained radicals or philosophers and obscurantists, believing in its possibility can help us see the world anew, and puts us in distinguished company. We tell ourselves that an everyday experience, no matter how odd and arresting, can never be the highest art – but André Breton thought it could. We tell ourselves that the colours we paint on walls at home can never be art, no matter how much pleasure they give us – but Piet Mondrian thought they could. Instead, we accept defeat, and tell ourselves that art is something that only someone else has the privilege to own. Keep the creativity; these are the attitudes we ought to abolish. Morgan Falconer is the author of How to Be Avant-Garde (WW Norton). Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art: by Orlando Whitfield (Profile, £20) Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute by Nicholas Fox Weber (Knopf, £30)
Boston Globe
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A look back at when art was revolutionary
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Related : Advertisement Into this debate marches Morgan Falconer, an art critic and educator at Sotheby's. His new book, ' enfant terribles of the early 20th century, who radically transformed our perception of what art can be with their unorthodox, confrontational, and irreverent methods. It's an engrossing survey, full of colorful characters and winning personal touches. Like all good art, it ultimately raises more questions than it answers. Falconer is bored by what he sees at today's big art fairs and exhibitions. According to him, where once artists sought to épater la bourgeoisie — that is, to disturb the conventions and the complacency of polite society — today, they seem more inclined to cater to it. He describes a sad epiphany he experienced at Art Basel Miami: 'I sat down at a picnic table and tried to rouse my soul with another espresso and an intensely refrigerated pastrami sandwich. … I realized I didn't want any more art. Not today … but not tomorrow either. I wondered, in fact, whether I'd ever want to see more art again.' Advertisement He, too, longs for the excitement of a bygone era, and out of this crisis divines his mission: 'We need to recall what an extraordinary thing it could be,' he writes, 'for art to enter life.' With this in mind, he takes readers on a tour of last century's most radical avant-garde movements — Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, and Situationism — in search of inspiring examples that he hopes can shake us — or, maybe just him — from this torpor. Related : The movements Falconer explores are by no means identical, but they share a few common threads: a bold vision, often articulated in a brash manifesto; charismatic hype men, capable of promulgating that vision beyond the movement's insular clique; and a commitment to taking art out of stultifying museums and comfortable sitting rooms in order to recenter it in the daily lives of regular people. Their adherents were not interested in simply making pleasant, aesthetic works for the contemplation of high-minded collectors or appreciators. In the troubling aftermath of the Great War, when little seemed certain, these artists sought to make the world their canvas and desired no less than to reshape society in their own image. 'Over a hundred years ago, a generation of artists were serious and ambitious enough to question what art's purpose was in the world,' he writes, 'and to ask whether it might be put to new ends.' To illustrate this, Falconer provides readers with compelling capsule biographies of important figures, including the bellicose Filipino Marinetti, author of the Futurist manifesto, which declared the movement's intention to 'sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.' He illuminates the short life of the anarchic Cabaret Voltaire, which lasted less than six months but launched a slew of trailblazing artists, etching Dada indelibly in the annals of art history. And he charts the rise and fall of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus school, whose minimalist aesthetic and practical ethos is today essentially the foundation for all modern design. 'They bound together in cultish cells,' Falconer writes, 'they explored obscure knowledge, and they scorned the public.' And while he isn't advocating that contemporary artists should mirror their tactics exactly, he does believe that there's much to be learned from the avant-garde's disdain for convention and their desire to utterly separate from the past. Related : Advertisement Art is a never-ending dialectic between a disruptive, revolutionary spirit and an anesthetizing bourgeois sensibility that seeks to blunt the cutting edge. Kissick and Falconer argue that the pendulum has swung too far in one direction and a rebalancing is in order. To put it simply: Art needs antagonists. But it's important to be clear about who exactly we should be antagonizing. Pinning the blame on identity politics lets the institutional-curatorial complex that has co-opted a genuine concern for marginalized voices to its own commercial ends off the hook, and risks inviting a reactionary backlash that would only serve to validate bad-faith culture-war grievances. One need only to look at Marinetti and the Futurists to see how easily the avant-garde can serve as a catspaw for fascism. Falconer marks out his target more clearly — it's the money. '[T]he wealth that nurtures [art] seems only to increase its power and mystique, and hence its distance from us,' he writes. No matter what form art takes, be it a narrow exploration of personal identity or a broad, universal commentary on society, its future — and perhaps our own — depends on reducing that distance. Advertisement HOW TO BE AVANT-GARDE: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art By Morgan Falconer Norton, 288 pages, $32.99 Michael Patrick Brady is a book critic from Boston. He can be reached at mike@
