Michelle Santiago Cortés — The End of Research

OpenAI now sells a half-zip with the word Research embroidered on it in cursive. Santiago Cortés puts that merch drop at the center of an argument about what the word has come to mean: moodboards, to-be-read lists, TikToks inviting you to spend a research day with someone, a whole leisure economy that borrowed academia's prestige and left the verification behind. Published July 24 in ArtReview. The sharpest turn is on artists, who she places awkwardly close to the scene of the crime once the accountability question is raised, since art has no protocols for verifying anything. It ends where the argument should start: nothing worth calling research survives without a little friction.