Volcanic vulvas and hermaphrodite marble: Ovid’s Metamorphoses reshaped at the Rijksmuseum
Artists from Bernini to Louise Bourgeois are brought together in a new exhibition exploring the uncomfortable erotic parables of the ancient Roman poetOn three massive screens in a darkened room, snakes glide over the face of artist Juul Kraijer – covering her eyes, caressing her lips.She is the silent but terrifying snake-headed Medusa, and one of the surprises in an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam revolving around Greek and Roman myths.While the show features rarely lent works from masters such as Caravaggio, Bernini, Rodin and Brâncuși, it marries them with modern artists who reinterpret the legends where male gods do all they can to get their wicked way and the powerless are punished.Transgender bodies, bare breasts and even a volcanic vulva appear in artworks inspired by Roman poet Ovid’s masterpiece, Metamorphoses.Taco Dibbits, general director of the Rijksmuseum, believes the 200 myths and legends from this ancient epic poem still speak to our uncertain times.
“The Metamorphoses have inspired artists for over 2,000 years and the subject is very relevant today, when everything is changing,” he says.“Things are morphed into other forms.People morph into other people.It’s about the force of nature and giving an explanation to our passions, to our sadness, to our fears.That’s what makes it so intensely human.
”The show features plaster models by Auguste Rodin, with figures emerging from crude rock like the female sculpture created by Pygmalion in Ovid’s legend, who comes to life.There is a room inspired by Leda and the Swan, with Zeus “seducing” the Spartan queen by taking the bird’s form.It also includes a rare loan from the Louvre.Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 17th-century carving of Sleeping Hermaphroditus – which sets an ancient Roman sculpture of a hermaphrodite with male and female sexual organs on a lifelike marble mattress – was inspired by Ovid’s story of a couple’s bodies merging in sexual union.There are some uncomfortable outcomes for women in the tales.
Jupiter assumes the form of a cloud or shower of gold to impregnate his female target.As one explanatory board admits: “His loves are rarely tender – more often coercive and one-sided.”Modern artists, particularly women, give another point of view: South African sculptor Nandipha Mntambo’s 2009 bronze of Jupiter as a bull is cast into a powerful, female form.The story of Arachne, who challenged the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest and was eventually transformed into a spider, becomes a massive bronze spider statue created by the late French-American artist Louise Bourgeois.A room about chaos and creation features Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s Birth (Gunpowder Works).
It depicts a female body made from earth and water, with what the gallery describes as a large “vulva-like form containing smouldering ash”.Frits Scholten, senior curator of sculpture, says there is a level of modern discomfort with the sexualisation of rape in some of Ovid’s stories and the art they inspired.“All these early stories in Ovid were reinterpreted by each generation and our generation looks at them in a different way,” he says.“We do address the fact that it’s often not very friendly to women.“At the same time, we say that you have to be nuanced in your view: these were scenes from fantasy, from ancient fairy tales, and they were often symbolic.
I’m not saying that they are OK, but they exist, they are part of our culture and part of our history,”Scholten points to a copy of a painting of Leda and the Swan, once created by the Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo,“That’s a bedchamber piece,” he said,“You can be fairly sure that it hung over a bed in a palace in Italy,The original one by Michelangelo went to France and was destroyed by the French queen – she didn’t like it.
So it is about power,”In celebrating these stories of change and transformation, Dibbits says the exhibition is ultimately about hope,“It gives a form to our fears, to the violence change often brings forth, but also the softness and the sweetness of it,” he says,“Everything undergoes a metamorphosis but the soul stays,That’s the hope: we haven’t lost our souls.
” Metamorphoses is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, from 6 February to 25 May
Condemnation of Elon Musk’s AI chatbot reached ‘tipping point’ after French raid, Australia’s eSafety chief says
The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, says global regulatory focus on Elon Musk’s X has reached a “tipping point” after a raid of the company’s offices in France this week.The raid on Tuesday was part of an investigation that included alleged offences of complicity in the possession and organised distribution of child abuse images, violation of image rights through sexualised deepfakes, and denial of crimes against humanity.A number of other countries – including the UK and Australia – and the EU have launched investigations in the past few weeks into X after its AI chatbot, Grok, was used to mass-produce sexualised images of women and children in response to user requests.Inman Grant told Guardian Australia: “It’s nice to no longer be a soloist, and be part of a choir.“We’ve been having so many productive discussions with other regulators around the globe and researchers that are doing important work in this space,” she said
Pinterest sacks two engineers for creating software to identify fired workers
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French headquarters of Elon Musk’s X raided by Paris cybercrime unit
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From ‘nerdy’ Gemini to ‘edgy’ Grok: how developers are shaping AI behaviours
Do you want an AI assistant that gushes about how it “loves humanity” or one that spews sarcasm? How about a political propagandist ready to lie? If so, ChatGPT, Grok and Qwen are at your disposal.Companies that create AI assistants, from the US to China, are increasingly wrestling with how to mould their characters, and it is no abstract debate. This month Elon Musk’s “maximally truth-seeking” Grok AI caused international outrage when it pumped out millions of sexualised images. In October OpenAI retrained ChatGPT to de-escalate conversations with people in mental health distress after it appeared to encourage a 16-year-old to take his own life.Last week, the $350bn San Francisco startup Anthropic released an 84-page “constitution” for its Claude AI
UK privacy watchdog opens inquiry into X over Grok AI sexual deepfakes
Elon Musk’s X and xAI companies are under formal investigation by the UK’s data protection watchdog after the Grok AI tool produced indecent deepfakes without people’s consent.The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating whether the social media platform and its parent broke GDPR, the data protection law.It said the creation and circulation of the images on social media raised serious concerns under the UK’s data regime, such as whether “appropriate safeguards were built into Grok’s design and deployment”.The move came after French prosecutors raided the Paris headquarters of X as part of an investigation into alleged offences including the spreading of child abuse images and sexually explicit deepfakes.X became the subject of heavy public criticism in December and January when the platform’s account for the Grok AI tool was used to mass-produce partially nudified images of girls and women
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