Enlarge / An AI-generated image from DALL-E 2 created with the prompt "A painting by Grant Wood of an astronaut couple, american gothic style." (credit: AI Pictures That Go Hard / X )

When OpenAI's DALL-E 2 debuted on April 6, 2022, the idea that a computer could create relatively photorealistic images on demand based on just text descriptions caught a lot of people off guard . The launch began an innovative and tumultuous period in AI history, marked by a sense of wonder and a polarizing ethical debate that reverberates in the AI space to this day.

Last week, OpenAI turned off the ability for new customers to purchase generation credits for the web version of DALL-E 2, effectively killing it. From a technological point of view, it's not too surprising that OpenAI recently began winding down support for the service. The 2-year-old image generation model was groundbreaking for its time, but it has since been surpassed by DALL-E 3's higher level of detail, and OpenAI has recently begun rolling out DALL-E 3 editing capabilities .

But for a tight-knit group of artists and tech enthusiasts who were there at the start of DALL-E 2, the service's sunset marks the bittersweet end of a period where AI technology briefly felt like a magical portal to boundless creativity. "The arrival of DALL-E 2 was truly mind-blowing," illustrator Douglas Bonneville told Ars in an interview. "There was an exhilarating sense of unlimited freedom in those first days that we all suspected AI was going to unleash. It felt like a liberation from something into something else, but it was never clear exactly what."

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The photographer turned painter specializes in images of Black female solitude, luxuriating in the importance of relaxing

As a painter, Danielle Mckinney has just one subject: Black women in moments of repose. From that singular basis she has managed to produce years of acclaimed artwork, developing an enviable style that has drawn the attention of, among others, Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Her new show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, titled Quiet Storm, offers 12 works that suggestively combine elements of exhalation and simmering intensity.

Hold your Breath, one of the displayed works, is as good a starting point as any, with its alluring subject sitting atop a mere suggestion of a chair, a long cigarette perched between two fingers and a gorgeous burnt orange robe draping languorously over her body. The slight upturn to her head offers a sense of absolute restful satisfaction, and the olive green background seems the perfect complement to the subject’s mood. All in all, the painting comes together with a simplicity and precision that is seductive, and that holds the eye.

Orlando Whitfield was a student when he became best friends with Inigo Philbrick, ‘the art world’s Bernie Madoff’. He talks about how their decade of hustling would lead one to a breakdown – and the other to jail

• ‘The day we tried to bag a Banksy’: read an extract from Whitfield’s explosive exposé

Orlando Whitfield is a youngish man, shy, with a reddish beard. His hands are aggressively tattooed, as if they’d been laid, backs down, on wet newspaper. The ink is a form of armour, he says, like his pranking brand of humour (for a while his iCloud hotspot was “Lord Lucan’s iPhone”). But he’s earnest, too, quick to draw on a literary quotation. Today he has arrived at lunch apologetic and soaked through, having been caught on his bike in a downpour.

We’ve met at the Academy Club – his choice – an old-timers’ haunt in Soho, London, with black oilcloths on tables and stained wainscotting. “Hogarth’s dining room,” he calls it. We’re here to discuss his former best friend Inigo Philbrick , the London-based American art dealer who swindled friends, business associates, investors and collectors out of millions of dollars before going on the run in 2019. Philbrick, 36, was jailed in 2020. In 2022 he was sentenced to seven years for wire fraud and ordered to forfeit $86m (£68m). A stunned art world is still puzzling over how he pulled off this heist. The maître d’ brings a fan heater to dry Whitfield’s jeans.

An exclusive extract from Orlando Whitfield’s explosive book about the $80m art fraudster

• ‘The money is not real – it’s a feckless level of wealth’ – read an interview with Orlando Whitfield

To be a good art dealer you need to be both prescient and manipulative. The mere ability to spot a trend or an artist is not enough. You have to know how to get what you want from the situation, to buy early and hold your nerve. That I never had this instinct can be evidenced by the fact that when I went to the British street artist Banksy ’s Christmas pop-up, Santa’s Ghetto, in December 2004, I bought two prints for £100 each. I took them home, stuck one on my wall with drawing pins in the full glare of a south-facing window, and the other I promptly lost to the murky gods of the underbed. Today, in good condition, those prints would be worth upwards of £150,000. Each.

When I told Inigo [Philbrick] this story he almost fell off his chair laughing. The art world at the time cared little for Banksy and I suspect the feeling was mutual. Inigo, however, sensed opportunity. One afternoon in the autumn of 2007, he emailed me an image of a pair of metal doors. The email contained no text but the subject line read, “Call me when you’ve seen this.” At first I was confused. The doors looked ordinary, grubby. The photo was blurry but when I zoomed in I noticed at the bottom of the door on the left what appeared to be a Banksy rat wearing a baseball cap and holding a beatbox on its shoulder.

Prospect Cottage on the beach at Dungeness, Kent was a home and sanctuary for the artist and film-maker Derek Jarman. The gardens are world famous, but the interior, shielded from public view by net curtains hung by his partner, Keith Collins, after his death, has been largely unseen. This haven has been photographed by Gilbert McCarragher, and Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman’s House is published by Thames & Hudson

Why are there almost no tears in great works of art? Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli is rectifying this – by embroidering balloon-shaped drops on to modern mashups of Giotto and Botticelli

Since tears express intense emotion, you’d think great painters would have fallen over themselves to depict people crying. Wrong, says Francesco Vezzoli. “Just Google books about tears in art,” says the Italian artist via video call. “There aren’t any. There are some tears in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, but that’s an extreme painting. You should find tears on the face of Christ, but that happens only once.” This is in Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo, from 1475. “Go to the Kunsthistorischen Museum in Vienna: no tears. In European religious paintings, there should be tears on the faces of every saint because they all died for martyrdom. But tears are very rare.”

To correct this remarkable oversight, over the past 15 years Vezzoli has embroidered tears on to reproductions of paintings by great Renaissance artists from Giotto to Botticelli and Lotto. Sewing has been long part of Vezzoli’s practice: he used to frequent a needlepoint shop called Creativity while at Central St Martin’s in London in the early 1990s (when he wasn’t clubbing, that is, or writing his dissertation on homoeroticism in Brazilian soap operas).

The artist, who has died aged 93, spent her life battling white male dominance, in the gallery and beyond. Her work foregrounded Black American experience with a raw and unforgettable power

When New York’s Museum of Modern Art reopened in 2019 after a radical rehang, its most headline-grabbing display placed Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die eye to eye with Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. For years, MoMA had been criticised for its shocking gender imbalance and lack of diversity. Ringgold was among the feminists to protest about the museum in the late 1960s, but it would be decades before it paid attention. The museum’s permanent display told a story of modern art imagined as a sequential progression driven almost entirely by the work of white men. In 2019, that started to change.

Painted 60 years apart – Picasso’s was completed in 1907, Ringgold’s in 1967 – the pairing of Die and Les Demoiselles invited a different kind of storytelling, one that acknowledged the debt of influence Picasso owed African art, the influence he in turn exerted over generations that followed and the rich complexity that might emerge from acknowledging plural art histories.

Founder of Black Audio Film Collective says he would have laughed if someone had said he’d someday be in the UK pavilion

Britain’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the world’s largest and most prominent art event, begins with video of delicate Holbein drawings from the Tudor court being washed over by the eddies of a stream and ends with the death of a British-Nigerian man, David Oluwale, who drowned in a Yorkshire river after being beaten by local police in 1969.

Along the way, in filmmaker Sir John Akomfrah’s exhibition, comes a sumptuously told visual and auditory story of migration and colonialism, held together by the image of flowing water. It culminates in images of the arrival in Britain of the Windrush generation – those who migrated from the Caribbean to the UK in the years after the second world war, often to work in British public services.

Painting by Graham Sutherland is being displayed at Blenheim Palace before being auctioned in June

An intimate study of Winston Churchill that has been in private hands for seven decades has gone on show in the room at Blenheim Palace in which Britain’s most famous prime minister was born, before being auctioned in June.

It was the work of Graham Sutherland, one of the most highly regarded artists of his time. Sutherland was commissioned to paint Churchill by the Houses of Parliament to mark the wartime leader’s 80th birthday in November 1954.

Sutherland’s portrait of Churchill will be on public view at Blenheim Palace from 16-21 April, and at Sotheby’s in London and New York before its sale.