Russia’s Victory Day, its foremost national holiday, in commemoration of its defeat of Nazi Germany at unthinkable cost, also serves as a showcase of its military might. Last year, as the year before, tanks and missiles, including nuclear-capable weapons, rolled through Red Square. In 2024, Moscow staged an exhibition of captured war trophies: military hardware taken in Ukraine. Source link
The former computational biologist has long been a proponent of audio-visual art (he even runs his own company, Mesh, dedicated to the same), and that experience was on show here. In terms of sheer sensory overload, this was it: as music played, audiences watched as the massive screen raced to keep up, displaying neon cityscapes one minute, and migrating birds the next, all of it soundtracked by Cooper’s own music. Source link
It was a scene straight out of an ’80s John Woo crime thriller: I exited an anonymous black van and stepped into a sprawling marina, the dusklight shimmering off the brawny metal cargo containers stacked high in every direction. A squadron of men in black suits, dark shades, and earpieces were there to greet me. The only real difference between this and, say, the high-octane finale of 1986’s A Better Tomorrow? The disproportionate number of Tabis on the feet of practically everyone around me. On April 1, the final day of Shanghai Fashion Week, Maison Margiela took over one of the Chinese metropolis’s busiest shipyards to stage its first-ever runway presentation outside Paris. It made for an especially fitting location given the ambitious weekslong project that the show kicked off: A series of exhibitions, dubbed Maison Margiela Folders, set across a quartet of major Chinese cities, each designed to help import the avant-garde house’s most essential codes to the superpower. The first edition opened on April 2 in Shanghai’s ritzy Huangpu District, featuring a display …
La Hermandad de San Gonzalo (Brotherhood of San Gonzalo) procesion crossing the Guadalquivir River during holy week on March 29, 2026 in Seville, Spain. Fran Santiago/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Fran Santiago/Getty Images SEVILLE, Spain — Each spring, for one week, Seville transforms. The scent of orange blossoms mixes with heady incense. Booming drums and soaring brass bands echo down narrow streets. Gilded floats topped with life-like statues and vibrant floral arrangements are carried across cobblestones in elaborate processions. These parades unite pageantry, penance and tradition in a display so beautiful that it touches the hearts, even of those who don’t believe in their underlying message. This is Seville’s Holy Week, known as Semana Santa. Penitents of Santa Genoveva brotherhood wait before taking part in a procession during Holy Week (Semana Santa) observances on March 30 in Seville, Spain. Marcelo del Pozo/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Marcelo del Pozo/Getty Images The brotherhood of San Gonzalo crosses Isabel II bridge on their way to the cathedral on the second official day of the Holy …
The recent Netflix hit series Adolescence crystallised growing public concern about the proliferation of male supremacist beliefs targeted at young men. So Inside the Manosphere, Louis Theroux’s new documentary for the same platform, arrives at a critical moment in the masculinity debate. Inside the Manosphere sets out to explore a group of prominent “manfluencers” who promise young men status, wealth and sexual success through a worldview shaped by misogynistic and male-supremacist beliefs about gender and power. By crafting a stylised storyline that focuses on the few people benefiting from this phenomenon, the documentary risks presenting an idealised portrait of the manosphere that downplays the insecurity, hostility and exploitation that sustains it. Despite moments of scrutiny, this documentary’s glamorisation of its subjects (epitomised by a slow motion shot of one subject stepping out of a sports car) renders the interrogation superficial. In other words, the show presents performative, profit-driven masculinity through the same aspirational lens that fuels these figures online appeal. In doing so, Inside the Manosphere simplifies the vast range of misogynistic and male-supremacist attitudes, …
Emerald Fennell’s retelling of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights finally hits cinema screens this weekend. Ever since the first set of photos were released, the anachronisms of the costumes have been central to the conversation. As fashion industry watchdog Diet Prada put it: “The costume design for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights scandalised audiences with its freaky mix of Oktoberfest corseting meets 1950’s ballgowns meets futuristic liquid organza meets … Barbie?” Viewers will soon be able to see Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran’s artistic vision. Cathy’s wedding dress is made from a material resembling cellophane, as if she’s been giftwrapped for her husband. Photograph: 2026 Warner Bros. Ent/PA The film plays fast and loose with period costume. Durran told Vogue: “We’re not representing a moment in time at all.” The mood board for Cathy’s costumes included Thierry Mugler, Alexander McQueen, a German milkmaid-style, and Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian and contemporary fashion. “The challenge was to distill that into looks that told the story that Emerald wanted to tell,” Durran says. Storytelling – and spectacle – rather …
Image via Wikimedia Commons In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” influential German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin introduced the term “aura” to describe an authentic experience of art. Aura relates to the physical proximity between objects and their viewers. Its loss, Benjamin argued, was a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon caused by mass media’s imposition of distance between object and viewer, though it appears to bring art closer through a simulation of intimacy. The essay makes for potent reading today. Mass media — which for Benjamin meant radio, photography, and film — turns us all into potential actors, critics, experts, he wrote, and takes art out of the realm of the sacred and into the realm of the spectacle. Yet it retains the pretense of ritual. We make offerings to cults of personality, expanded in our time to include influencers and revered and reviled billionaires and political figures who joust in the headlines like professional wrestlers, led around by the chief of all heels. As Benjamin writes: The film responds to …
