Hyperallergic’s Weekly Wrap: A Subway Satire and AI Anxiety

Hyperallergic’s latest weekly roundup opens with a piece of satire that starts on the subway. The narrator rides under the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan, eyes fixed on an ad for the Broadway musical Les Misérables, while a social media feed fills with looting and vandalism from France. That feed, the narrator says, paints a violent picture of what are largely peaceful student protests.

From there the piece sketches a city in two registers. According to the newsletter’s telling, the art world’s blue-chip class shuts down Art Basel Paris early and flees, and the Louvre closes to protect its treasures. The narrator quips that if you loot a little they throw you in jail, and if you loot a lot they let you open a museum. Back in New York, the scene shifts to a benefit dinner for an art residency held in a former bank, where an auctioneer works the room, paddles rise and fall, and a donation ticker on a big screen climbs. Overhead, a stained-glass skylight and a stopped golden clock sit near a marble inscription about saving versus earning.

The piece then drifts through Midtown, where a bodega window advertises a $650 million Powerball jackpot and the narrator daydreams about buying art just to support artists. It ends in an impoverished neighborhood where someone has spray-painted “Class War” across a residential building, and the narrator buys a ticket at a gas station convenience store.

Then comes the twist. The newsletter reveals that the opening was written by Claude, prompted to produce an introduction for an opinion piece against AI use in art writing. In the newsletter’s framing, if the passage made you recoil, you may share the aversion to generative text that Valentina Di Liscia describes: an uncanny cadence, overconfident in style and hollow in substance, like a motivational LinkedIn post that leaves you with as much nourishment as a spoonful of Stevia.

The rest of the roundup is a menu of the week’s art coverage. Swann’s premiere print sale is set for October 29, with works ranging from Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn to Maurits C. Escher and Marc Chagall. Hrag Vartanian writes on a Native artist’s forms, where the beauty seduces but a visual history of destruction is embedded in each element. John Yau looks at an artist who carried his optical preoccupations into the 21st century. Eliza Swann covers an exhibition of 17 women artists whose work emerges through spirit communication, and Leah Triplett Harrington reviews “The Prime of Your Life,” which asks what recognition and market success mean for 18 women artists over 75.

Also in the mix: Natalie Haddad on a fashion exhibition that shapes a canon around the interests of those in charge, Dan Schindel on Fred Camper’s film “Suicide Note,” born out of grief and a city in collapse, and an interview by Daniela Mayer with Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, who says, “This history is dirty,” and sees the colonial past as an active force in her country’s present. Jennifer Samet’s Beer With a Painter conversation features Melissa Brown, a Brooklyn-based artist. And on October 28 in Brooklyn, Hyperallergic is hosting an evening of spooky cocktails and an art-themed costume contest.