The US state of Ohio has suspended tax breaks for datacenters, amid claims that the policy cost the state more than $1.5 billion in revenue during in 2025 alone. Ohio's Republican Governor Mike DeWine declared a pause in the state's server farm subsidy, directing its Tax Credit Authority to stop considering new datacenter sales tax exemption requests while officials review the industry’s costs and impacts. According to the Associated Press, the amount of money involved in Ohio’s tax break has ballooned, hugely exceeding earlier estimates, while opposition to the building of giant bit barns has also grown, as in other areas of the US that have become datacenter hotspots. Nonprofit research org Good Jobs First puts the cost of the sales tax exemption to the state at more than $1.5 billion in 2025, about 11 times the state’s $136 million forecast. It cites figures from news network Signal Ohio, which found the figure had inflated from $555 million in lost revenue the previous year, which was itself four times more than the state government had forecast. However, the pause is only on the approval of new tax exemptions – those projects in operation that have already had their tax breaks rubber-stamped will continue to feel the benefit. The sales tax exemption granted by Ohio is understood to be generous, covering not only building supplies for construction of the data halls, but also the server racks, cooling facilities, and other infrastructure to fill them. According to Good Jobs First, the revelation means Ohio joins the small club of US states now losing more than $1 billion annually on tax breaks for cloud-hosting campuses. The other three are Virginia – the “datacenter capital of the world” – Texas, and Georgia, where subsidies are projected to cost $2.5 billion this year. The organization has been agitating for greater transparency in the concessions afforded to datacenter operators for some time, claiming that in many cases, schemes which were supposed to attract investment and create jobs were resulting in taxpayers helping some of the richest corporations on the planet buy servers, equipment, and power infrastructure. Last November, it published a list of 36 states that exempt building materials and IT equipment for datacenters from sales and use taxes, yet only 5 states disclose estimated or actual total costs of those exemptions. In April, it upped the ante by claiming that many US states and local authorities are violating generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) by failing to disclose revenue lost to bit barn tax subsidy schemes. One of those it pointed the finger at is Indiana, but the state has since come clean and confirmed the tax exemptions cost it $655 million annually. Most of that - $561 million - is going to Amazon Back in Ohio, a campaign has started to get a constitutional ban on datacenters that consume more than 25 MW of power. The group behind it, Ohio Residents for Responsible Development, claims to have gathered 25,000 signatures in five weeks. According to reports, communities in other parts of the US, including Nevada, California, and Maryland are planning to hold ballots on some form of datacenter ban in their areas as well. ®
Het wordt opnieuw een drukke week vanwege wegwerkzaamheden. De Botlekbrug is vier nachten dicht. Ook op de A27 is elke nacht wel een afsluiting. En op de A4 en de A29 wordt gewerkt.
Fender wil kleinere gitaarbouwers verbieden zogenaamde ‘s-type’ gitaren te maken. Waarom wekt dat zoveel woede op? Wat maakt het deze gitaar bijzonder? En: hoe klinkt-ie eigenlijk?
Voor veel dertig-minners is comedy vooral iets dat zich online afspeelt. Daar zie je een jonge generatie comedians die je niet vindt in het theater: ‘Op Insta zit wat ouder publiek. Daar kun je nog een grap van veertig seconden opbouwen’
Israël veroverde zondag het roemruchte Zuid-Libanese kasteel Belfort. Iran beschouwt dit als een schending van het bestand en staakt volgens het officieuze staatspersbureau de onderhandelingen met de VS.
Calls the event ‘perfect place’ for her return to court
Williams will play doubles with Victoria Mboko
Serena Williams has announced her sensational return to professional tennis at 44 years old next week at the Queen’s Club in London.
Williams will return to competition with a wildcard in the women’s doubles draw at Queen’s, a WTA 500 event in its second edition. She has not competed in the last four years since retiring from tennis at the US Open in 2022. Williams is a 23-time grand slam singles champion, the women’s open-era record, and a 14-time doubles champion. She is the only player to win the career golden slam in singles and doubles.
New York City in the 1980s felt like a very different place. Imagine subway cars cloaked inside-out in graffiti and Times Square without the monumental LED screens. Evidenced by the likes of photographers Steven Siegel, Willy Spiller, and Jamel Shabazz, not to mention Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style(1982), a period of intense, new, rough-around-the-edges energy was canonized. The era marked the birth of hip hop and New Wave, MTV, iconic fashion, legendary nightlife, and Pop Art.
In 1978, just prior to the economy reeling during a major recession, a 20-year-old Keith Haring (1958-1990) moved to Manhattan to study at the School of Visual Arts. “I arrived in New York at a time when the most beautiful paintings being shown in the city were on wheels—on trains—paintings that traveled to you instead of vice versa,” he said in a piece writing published by the The Keith Haring Foundation. The artist was fascinated by people’s responses to art encountered out in the open and unexpectedly—when it found its way into daily life and became a conduit to conversation and curiosity.
Whether with chalk or black paint, Haring could create decisive, confident line drawings of angels, UFOs, dancing figures, snakes, and other motifs virtually anywhere, many of which were temporary. His work is a highlight of the rescued Luna Luna amusement park, and a mural in Amsterdam was obscured by cladding for three decades before being rediscovered. My dad fondly recalls seeing Haring’s paintings in the hallway of the former Manhattan Pearl Paint art supplies store in 1980. I grew up recognizing his signature cartoonish style long before I knew who he was, wearing his work on a favorite T-shirt. And it’s this prescient “art everywhere” focus that grounds an exhibition opening this week at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art called Keith Haring in 3D.
While he didn’t consider himself a graffiti artist, Haring reveled in the technical precision of tags and unique interventions by street artists like Fab 5 Freddy, Lady Pink, Jean-Michel Basquiat as SAMO with collaborator Al Diaz, and many others were painting all over the city. “Graffiti spoke of a world that was hip and streetwise, creative and spontaneous and underground—all that he admired and wanted to be,” says the foundation. And as the trains rolled through subterranean stations lined with advertisements, Haring noticed something else: ready-made blank canvases.
During the recession, advertisers pulled their investment in subway station ad space, and the MTA replaced empty billboards with large sheets of black paper. By this time, Haring was already interested in the idea of art outside of gallery and museum spaces and how “different people saw different things in the drawings,” he says. As he made big works in an open-air space, he was fascinated by the number of people who would stop and the conversations he work would ignite. “This was the first time I realized how many people could enjoy art if they were given the chance,” he said.
Haring’s subway series, Art in Transit, launched him to the apex of the 1980s art scene, where Andy Warhol was already cementing Pop Art’s presence and a circle of graffiti artists, performers, and other creatives were defining the look, sounds, and feel of the decade. Haring made his drawings very quickly to avoid arrest—the police hauled him away on at least one occasion—and his friend, photographer Ivan Dalla Tana, documented many of the works before they were torn down or destroyed. Fortunately, a handful survive, including one in Keith Haring in 3D.
Installation view of ‘Keith Haring in 3D’
The tall chalk drawing on black paper is one of few two-dimensional works in the show, but it’s one of many in the collection of Larry Warsh, who has collaborated with curator Glenn Adamson to bring together a wide range of Haring’s sculptural and multimedia pieces. Today, Haring’s work is among some of the most recognizable by mainstream audiences, yet despite critiques that his work has become “sanitized” in its commercialization—something he was actively, and even controversially, a proponent of during his lifetime—viewers are invited into a unique dialogue with literally a new dimension to his work.
The exhibition is situated within a long, open space, so that viewers can see from one end to the other and meander through different areas free from a prescribed or chronological route. Most of the peripheral wall space is also entirely empty, steering visitors into the center to circumambulate a wide variety of forms and installations. Wandering around steel sculptures, ceramic vessels, archival items, and paintings on numerous found objects, the “all-over” sense of Haring’s oeuvre is manifest. I get the sense that Haring could see the potential in any object or space. If something had a surface, it could be art. How or where you personally encounter it, however, is fundamentally a part of the experience, and this is woven into the exhibition’s design.
From inflatable versions of his iconic “Radiant Baby” motif to an altarpiece made following his diagnosis with AIDS to a series of giant, router-carved “totems,” the works in Keith Haring in 3D celebrate experimentation and collaboration. The exhibition also spotlights, if incidentally, imperative issues in contemporary art today, from cultural appropriation to queer experience, not to mention his candid and direct approach to sharing his experiences with AIDS, from which he died at the age of 31.
Many of the artworks in the exhibition are drawn from Warsh’s personal collection. He had the foresight to collect artworks and fragments of Haring’s studio along with hand-painted garments, the embellished hoods of damaged yellow New York City taxi cabs, a headboard, and even a refrigerator tagged by an array of graffiti artists. With a magpie-like eye for the artist’s recognizably bold-lined paintings, Warsh rescued a steel I-beam from the building Haring lived in when it was torn down, plus jackets and other garments that the artist painted, among many other objects.
Warsh has long been fascinated by the way the artist applied his visual language to just about anything he could get his hands on. A papier-mâché sculpture called “Untitled (Elephant)” has a unique story to it, too. Adamson shares that the elephant belonged to Warhol, who encouraged Haring to add his own interpretation, but hidden beneath its black-and-white composition is actually an original pink-toenailed version by Basquiat.
A series of works Haring called Totems were inspired by Native American totem poles of the Pacific Northwest region, which he viewed as symbols of community and unity. Large wall-hung mask works are clearly influenced by African masking traditions, coated in Haring’s characteristic lines and bold shapes. Adamson acknowledges that today, we view a white artist’s appropriation of these cultural customs through a different lens, and he expounds on Haring’s interpretation of the “totemic” in a recent article published in Artforum.
Other facets of the exhibition highlight the role of music and pop culture, the New York City club scene, the commodification of art, and Haring’s death from AIDS. A number of posters and merchandise-type objects nod to the artist’s Pop Shop, a retail-meets-art-installation he opened in 1986 in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. It may be seen in the spirit of Claes Oldenburg’s The Store installation in 1961, which also circumvented the conventional gallery show with a DIY, entrepreneurial spirit—something we see so much of today with the aid of social media but at the time was virtually unheard of. Haring’s Pop Shop was controversial, but it was meant to prove a point: “It’s about participation on a big level,” he said. He wanted his art to be as accessible to as many people as possible.
That Haring’s work was virtually everywhere—music videos featuring Madonna and Grace Jones, on advertisements, in fashion, throughout subway stations—is the guiding principle behind Keith Haring in 3D also marking the inaugural show in Crystal Bridges’ expansion. The entire permanent collection has been re-imagined throughout a series of both existing and new spaces, which will open in their entirety this weekend.
Adamson and Warsh originally conceived of Keith Haring in 3D as strictly a book project, but it quickly evolved into something much more. A new book of the same title does coincide with the show, positioning the artist’s three-dimensional works in a new light. Find your copy on Bookshop, and visit the exhibition in Bentonville, Arkansas, starting June 6 and continuing through January 25, 2027. You might also enjoy the Keith Haring Pop Up Book by Poposition Press.
When Craig Hubbard moved from Brooklyn to Venice Beach in 2013, he had an established creative career as an animator and comic book colorist, but it had been a long time since he had picked up a camera. The golden hour hues of the West Coast’s legendary sunsets reacquainted him with lens-based work, and he began documenting the areas he frequented in his spare time. “As an avid surfer and former skater, I gravitate toward skateparks and water,” he tells Colossal. And with the ocean, of course, come the waves.
Venice Beach is a funky, coastal Los Angeles neighborhood that has retained its laid-back, surf-loving vibe despite new developments. Surfers await swells in areas like the Breakwater and the Venice Beach Pier, and Hubbard heads out with his own board and his camera. “Dusk, dawn, and fog banks activate my senses,” he says. Tapping into his enthusiasm for graphic design, he focuses on bold outlines and forms, high contrast, and the energy of directionality and motion. “Nature ultimately does the heavy lifting, though,” he adds.
Hubbard’s photos are ethereal and cinematic, with surfers and wave crests illuminated by the early morning sun or backdropped by the marine layer. Sometimes the intense spray, curl, shoulder, or lip become the sole subjects of the portraits. “The water is the muse and artist,” Hubbard recently told an interviewer. “I’m just a biased translator and documentarian. Lastly, my ego relaxes in the ocean; the need to peacock recedes. This is where my best work comes from—or favorite, I should say.”
Follow Hubbard’s work on Instagram and see some of his videos on YouTube.
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