Tag: 02.20.18

Lessons Hollywood Should Learn From The Success Of “Black Panther”

Black Panther is a blockbuster that feels like it belongs to the artists who created it as much as the company that produced it. In a market dominated by sequels, the projects that actually break through with viewers tend to be movies that were made with more of a purpose than just being another link in a never-ending money-making chain. Black Panther is poised to make more money around the world than any Marvel movie aside from 2012’s The Avengers.

The First Great Populist Rebellion: Erasmus Versus Luther

Erasmus was an internationalist who sought to establish a borderless Christian union; Luther was a nationalist who appealed to the patriotism of the German people. Where Erasmus wrote exclusively in Latin, Luther often used the vernacular, the better to reach the common man. Erasmus wanted to educate a learned caste; Luther, to evangelize the masses. For years, they waged a battle of ideas, with each seeking to win over Europe to his side, but Erasmus’s reformist and universalist creed could not match Luther’s more emotional and nationalistic one.

Pop Culture Isn’t Just Bad Art, It Has An Insidious Impact

Like many émigrés, Theodor Adorno was initially disoriented by US mass culture, which had not yet overrun Europe as it would after the war. This disorientation became a principled distrust. He claimed that capitalist popular culture – jazz, cinema, pop songs, and so on – manipulates us into living lives empty of true freedom, and serves only to distort our desires. Popular culture is not the spontaneous expression of the people, but a profit-driven industry – it robs us of our freedom and bends us to conform to its needs for profit.

Why Artists And Criminals Have A Leg Up On Predicting The Future

“I decided to take a page out of William Gibson’s playbook and go and find some artists and criminals and see what they were doing with new technologies. As I see it, artists and criminals have something in common: Neither is constrained by social conventions. In a later interview Gibson said, “Criminals are in effect entrepreneurs with the brakes off. They look at whatever the latest technology is and think, ‘What can I do with this?’ Artists are unconstrained by the limits of business and societal conventions.”

There’s Always A Downside. Why We Should Listen To Artists

There is a kind of optimism that it takes to be an inventor. But the father of the Internet thinks inventors need the artists. “It’s the mind-stretching practice of trying to think what the implications of technology will be that makes me enjoy science fiction,” Cerf says. “It teaches me that when you’re inventing something you should try to think about what the consequences might be.” The artists are the ones who recognize a fundamental truth: Human nature hasn’t changed much since Shakespeare’s time, no matter what fancy new tools you give us.

This ‘Onion Public Radio’ Podcast Sticks It To ‘Serial’ And ‘S-Town’

“‘Do you know the girl who was shot then brutally stabbed over and over until her face was barely recognisable?’ If you’re familiar with the gory juggernaut of a genre that is the true-crime podcast, you will know this scenario is only a slight exaggeration – and that the genre is ripe for a spoof. Which is where intrepid investigator David Pascall comes in, alongside the residents of Bluff Springs, Nebraska, in A Very Fatal Murder.”