Collected

A Show About Chairs, Art and AI, and Almodóvar at Cannes

Written by Naomi Xu Elegant

May 21, 2026

What we’re obsessed with this week in craft and culture.

René Magritte apple painting overlaid with green image-recognition detection boxes and labels.

Seeing like a machine

In our recently-published conversation between Holly Herndon and Trevor Paglen, moderated by Max Read—author of Read Max (opens in new window), a sharp newsletter covering tech and Internet culture—the artists talked about creativity in the age of “slopification (opens in new window)” and what everyone gets wrong about making art with AI. For more on this, check out Paglen’s new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI (opens in new window). It’s an essay collection that begins, with startling prescience, in 2016, when most of us had not yet heard the phrases “machine learning” or “neural network,” but Paglen was already experimenting with early AI imaging systems.

One idea that stuck with me was that of “machine realism,” his term for how AI systems perceive images (and therefore the world) in a way that’s completely opposed to human perception. It means that an AI image classifier, for example, cannot understand Surrealist art. Trevor presented one such classifier with René Magritte’s Ceci N’est Pas Une Pomme (opens in new window) (This is Not an Apple) (1964). The AI used its training data to analyze the painting and provide the following conclusion: “This is an apple.” Paglen uses this example to tease out the utter incompatibility of a literal, logical, machine-realist outlook and a messy, subjective, human-artistic outlook. It adds new meaning to the title of the 1929 pipe/non-pipe predecessor to Magritte’s apple, The Treachery of Images (opens in new window). You might call it, as Paglen did in a 2019 piece (opens in new window), “the treachery of object recognition.”

Photo: Trevor Paglen’s The Treachery of Object Recognition (2019). Courtesy of the artist, Jessica Silverman, and Pace Gallery.

Large stone balanced inside white chair as sculptural installation against gallery wall.

An abundance of chairs

Chair Show at 125 Newbury (opens in new window) in New York has been one of my favorite exhibitions so far this year. (You can still catch it if you hurry—it closes this Saturday, May 23.) The name tells you all you need to know: it’s a show about chairs, and it is delightful. There are paintings of chairs, photographs of chairs, drawings of chairs, and chair-chairs; there are chairs by Donald Judd, chairs by Robert Rauschenberg, and chairs by Andy Warhol. The chairs are in one big room, and there are chairs hanging from the ceiling, chairs framed on the wall, and chairs standing (sitting?) all across the floor. These latter chairs are the most conceptually confusing part of the exhibit; normally, one might sit down in a chair without a second thought, but here they occupy a liminal space between sculpture and art object and functional furniture; it seemed safer not to try.

It was a crowded field but for me the best chair of all was Alicja Kwade’s Mono Matter (opens in new window) (2023), a simple white Monobloc (allegedly the world’s best-selling chair (opens in new window)) that, despite its flimsy plastic body, appears to be bearing the weight of a massive chunk of stone. The chair is actually painted bronze, which explains its impressive load-bearing capacity. I for one was fooled, and I’m not even an AI image classifier…

Photo: Alicja Kwade’s Mono Matter (2023). © Alicja Kwade, courtesy Pace Gallery.

Two women standing outdoors in volcanic landscape, facing one another in black and bright red clothing.

Almodóvar in the Canary Islands

I’m impatient for the movies in competition at the Cannes Film Festival to make it to theaters and satiate us cinephiles who are not getting previews in the sunny south of France right now. Though it’s been weeks since I watched the teaser trailer (opens in new window) for Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas—a tragicomedy that intriguingly promises to involve autofiction—there are two particular shots I can’t get out of my head: the opening one, in which two women lie on bright yellow towels in the black volcanic sand of a Canarian beach, the foamy tide lapping dangerously near; and another outdoor shot where the women walk in an old lava field amid what resembles an alien landscape of bombed-out craters and lurid green shrubs, but is in fact a vineyard (opens in new window). The stark contrasts of texture and color are a buzzy treat for the visual cortex; you couldn’t come up with a stronger case for shooting on location.

Photo: Iglesias Mas / El Deseo

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