Artist Tom Jung's 1977 painting introduced the world to the look and feel of George Lucas' blockbuster adventure. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Darth Vader's reign has ended. For a brief time, he owned the mantle of "Most Expensive Piece of Star Wars Memorabilia," but before you could say "more wealth than you can imagine" he fell once again, with a new challenger rising to take his place. It was only this past September that a verified screen-used lightsaber hilt wielded by the Dark Lord of the Sith in and set a sales record by fetching $3.65 million.

Two armed men have stolen eight engravings by French artist Matisse and at least another five by Brazilian painter Cândido Portinari from a library in São Paulo. Brazilian officials say the thieves held up a security guard and an elderly couple who were visiting the library before making off with the artworks on foot. They reportedly entered the library by the main entrance at 10:00 (13:00 GMT) on Sunday, and left by the same route, heading towards the nearest metro station. The heist comes less than two months after the art world was rocked by a brazen break-in at the Louvre museum in Paris, where thieves made off with priceless jewels. The engravings stolen from Biblioteca Mário de Andrade on Sunday formed part of a joint exhibition with the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art.

Emotions are a fundamental aspect of artistic expression. Due to their abstract nature, there is a broad spectrum of emotion realization in artworks. These are subject to historical change and their analysis requires expertise in art history. In this article, we investigate which aspects of emotional expression can be detected by current (2025) vision language models (VLMs). We present a case study of three VLMs (Llava-Llama and two Qwen models) in which we ask these models four sets of questions of increasing complexity about artworks (general content, emotional content, expression of emotions, and emotion symbols) and carry out a qualitative expert evaluation. We find that the VLMs recognize the content of the images surprisingly well and often also which emotions they depict and how they are expressed. The models perform best for concrete images but fail for highly abstract or highly symbolic images. Reliable recognition of symbols remains fundamentally difficult. Furthermore, the models continue to exhibit the well-known LLM weakness of providing inconsistent answers to related questions.

A surrealist painting from the 1940s by Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m (£41.8m) - shattering the auction record for an artwork by a female artist. The painting went for more than 1,000 times its original auction price in 1980, after a tense bidding battle between two collectors, according to the Sotheby's auction house. The auction also broke the previous record for the highest amount paid for a Kahlo portrait, which sold for $34.9 million in 2021. The work - titled El sueño (la cama), which is translated to The dream (The bed) - depicts Kahlo asleep in a canopy bed beneath a skeleton entwined with dynamite. It marks one of the Mexican artist's most psychologically charged self portraits, Sotheby's said, and was painted during a turbulent chapter in Kahlo's life - the year her former lover was assassinated and shortly after her divorce and remarriage.

The ancient ˁAin Samiya cup is one of the most remarkable finds of the Intermediate Bronze Age. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The message engraved in an ancient goblet's intricate artwork may have a different meaning than experts first believed. After reexamining the renowned ˁAin Samiya cup, an international team of archeologists argue the small, silver drinkware doesn't depict an early iteration of the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation myth. Instead, they now theorize that the engravings illustrate a much more peaceful origin story for the universe.

Although existing artistic style transfer methods have achieved significant improvement with deep neural networks, they still suffer from artifacts such as disharmonious colors and repetitive patterns. Motivated by this, we propose an internal-external style transfer method with two contrastive losses.

This position paper argues for the importance of open small AI models in creative independence for interactive art practices. Deployable locally, these models offer artists vital control over infrastructure and code, unlike dominant large, closed-source corporate systems. Such centralized platforms function as opaque black boxes, imposing severe limitations on interactive artworks, including restrictive content filters, preservation issues, and technical challenges such as increased latency and limited interfaces. In contrast, small AI models empower creators with more autonomy, control, and sustainability for these artistic processes. They enable the ability to use a model as long as they want, create their own custom model, either by making code changes to integrate new interfaces, or via new datasets by re-training or fine-tuning the model. This fosters technological self-determination, offering greater ownership and reducing reliance on corporate AI ill-suited for interactive art's demands. Critically, this approach empowers the artist and supports long-term preservation and exhibition of artworks with AI components. This paper explores the practical applications and implications of using open small AI models in interactive art, contrasting them with closed-source alternatives.

An artist sneaked an AI-generated print on to a gallery wall before bemused visitors alerted museum staff. The print was hung up at National Museum Cardiff by secretive artist Elias Marrow, who said his Empty Plate piece - depicting a young boy in school uniform holding a plate - was viewed by a few hundred people before it was removed. One visitor who noticed the artwork asked a member of staff about it, but said the museum worker admitted they had no idea about the piece or when it arrived. An Amgueddfa Cymru spokesperson said: An item was placed without permission on a gallery wall in National Museum Cardiff. We were alerted to this and have removed the item in question.

This paper explores the integration of AI technologies into the artistic workflow through the creation of Studies for, a generative sound installation developed in collaboration with sound artist Evala (https://www.ntticc.or.jp/en/archive/works/studies-for/). The installation employs SpecMaskGIT, a lightweight yet high-quality sound generation AI model, to generate and playback eight-channel sound in real-time, creating an immersive auditory experience over the course of a three-month exhibition. The work is grounded in the concept of a "new form of archive," which aims to preserve the artistic style of an artist while expanding beyond artists' past artworks by continued generation of new sound elements. This speculative approach to archival preservation is facilitated by training the AI model on a dataset consisting of over 200 hours of Evala's past sound artworks. By addressing key requirements in the co-creation of art using AI, this study highlights the value of the following aspects: (1) the necessity of integrating artist feedback, (2) datasets derived from an artist's past works, and (3) ensuring the inclusion of unexpected, novel outputs. In Studies for, the model was designed to reflect the artist's artistic identity while generating new, previously unheard sounds, making it a fitting realization of the concept of "a new form of archive." We propose a Human-AI co-creation framework for effectively incorporating sound generation AI models into the sound art creation process and suggest new possibilities for creating and archiving sound art that extend an artist's work beyond their physical existence. Demo page: https://sony.github.io/studies-for/

In open-ended domains like art, autonomous agents must generate ideas that are both original and internally coherent, yet current Large Language Models (LLMs) either default to familiar cultural patterns or sacrifice coherence when pushed toward novelty. We address this by introducing the Cultural Alien Sampler (CAS), a concept-selection method that explicitly separates compositional fit from cultural typicality. CAS uses two GPT-2 models fine-tuned on WikiArt concepts: a Concept Coherence Model that scores whether concepts plausibly co-occur within artworks, and a Cultural Context Model that estimates how typical those combinations are within individual artists' bodies of work. CAS targets combinations that are high in coherence and low in typicality, yielding ideas that maintain internal consistency while deviating from learned conventions and embedded cultural context. In a human evaluation (N = 100), our approach outperforms random selection and GPT-4o baselines and achieves performance comparable to human art students in both perceived originality and harmony. Additionally, a quantitative study shows that our method produces more diverse outputs and explores a broader conceptual space than its GPT-4o counterpart, demonstrating that artificial cultural alienness can unlock creative potential in autonomous agents.