Category: 5. Entertainment

An international team of researchers may have just cracked the code for what makes someone “cool.”

And no matter where you live, the personality traits that make someone “cool” appear to be consistent across countries, according to the study, published this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

The researchers found that, compared with people considered to be “good” or “favorable,” those considered “cool” are perceived to be more extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous.

“The most surprising thing was seeing that the same attributes emerge in every country,” said Todd Pezzuti, an associate professor of marketing at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile who was a co-lead researcher on the study.

“Regardless of whether it’s China or Korea or Chile or the US, people like people who are pushing boundaries and sparking change,” he said. “So I would say that coolness really represents something more fundamental than the actual label of coolness.”

‘Cool’ isn’t the same as ‘good’

The researchers – from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, the University of Arizona and the University of Georgia – conducted experiments from 2018 to 2022 with nearly 6,000 people across a dozen countries: Australia, Chile, China, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the United States.

The participants were asked to think of a person in their lives whom they perceive to be “cool,” “uncool,” “good” or “not good.” They were then asked to rate that person’s personality using two scales: the Big Five Personality scale, a widely used scientific model that helps describe personality traits, and the Portrait Values Questionnaire, intended to measure an individual’s basic values.

The study participants consistently associated being calm, conscientious, universalistic, agreeable, warm, secure, traditional and conforming with being a good person, more than with being a cool person. Being capable was considered to be both “cool” and “good” but not distinctly either. But the formula for being “cool” was having the six character traits – more extroverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open and autonomous – no matter the person’s age, gender or education level.

Pezzuti doesn’t think these “cool” traits are something that can be taught.

“We’re born with those attributes,” he said. “Five of those attributes are personality traits, and personality traits tend to be fairly stable.”

The research showed that cool people and good people aren’t the same, but there may be some overlapping traits, said co-lead researcher Caleb Warren, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Arizona.

“To be seen as cool, someone usually needs to be somewhat likable or admirable, which makes them similar to good people,” Warren said in a news release. “However, cool people often have other traits that aren’t necessarily considered ‘good’ in a moral sense, like being hedonistic and powerful.”

A limitation of the research was that only people who understood what “cool” means were included in the study. Pezzuti said it would be interesting – but difficult – to determine whether the findings would be similar among more traditional cultures or remote groups of people who may be less familiar with the term.

“We don’t know what we would find in supertraditional cultures like hunting-and-gathering tribes or sustenance farming groups,” Pezzuti said.

“One thing we would propose is that in those cultures, ‘cool’ people don’t have as important of a role because innovation, or cultural innovation, isn’t as important in those cultures,” he said. “So I would say that cool people are probably present in those cultures, but their role isn’t as big, and they’re probably not as admired as they are in other cultures.”

‘Cool’ can be controversial

When asked to think of a public figure or celebrity who embodies “coolness” based on his research, Pezzuti immediately said Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

“He’s a controversial figure, but someone who comes to my mind is Elon Musk,” Pezzuti said, adding that he checks all the boxes of the six attributes identified in the study.

Musk is “undeniably powerful” and autonomous, he said, and appears to be extroverted due to his presence on social media platforms and in the media.

“I hear that he’s timid, maybe more timid than he seems, but from an outsider, he seems very extroverted. He’s entertaining. He’s on podcasts and always in front of cameras,” Pezzuti explained.

Some of Musk’s behavior also appears to be hedonistic, he said. “He smoked marijuana on the most popular podcast in the world, ‘The Joe Rogan Experience.’”

And Pezzuti added that Musk’s ideas about colonizing Mars show him to be open and adventurous.

The new paper is one of the few empirical studies that examines what exactly makes people “cool,” said Jonah Berger, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

“While people have long wondered (and theorized) about what makes people cool, there hasn’t been a lot of actual empirical research on the topic, so it’s great to see work exploring this space,” Berger, who was not involved in the new paper, wrote in an email.

“While coolness might seem like something you are born with, there are certainly steps people can take to try and move in that direction,” he said. “Given how many people want to be cool, and how much money is spent with that goal in mind, it certainly seems worth studying.”

Future research in this space could evaluate coolness in tandem with goodness and badness rather than in isolation from it, said Jon Freeman, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University.

“In real life, coolness can be a positive quality but can also have a negative connotation in certain social contexts. It may be valuable for future work to examine the differences between good coolness and bad coolness, and this study’s approach offers a great foundation,” Freeman, who also was not involved in the new study, wrote in an email.

“From a scientific standpoint, cool would seem far more a product of inference and social construction than genetics, although low-level temperament informed by genetics could feed into ongoing personality construction,” he said.

“‘Cool’ is deeply ingrained in our social vocabulary because it serves as a shorthand for complex inferences. It encapsulates signals of status, affiliation, and identity in ways that are instantaneous yet deeply stereotyped. From a scientific perspective, studying coolness is important precisely because it reveals how rapid, schematic trait inferences influence behavior and social dynamics, especially in the age of social media and influencer culture.”

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The BBC announced that Last Pundit Standing – an exciting new competition series from BBC Creator Lab and BBC Sport that’s set to shake up the punditry game – will premiere on Monday 7 July on BBC iPlayer.

Episodes 1 and 2 will be available from 6am on Monday 7 July with new episodes dropping on iPlayer each week until the final on Monday 11 August. Each episode will also be available to watch on the BBC’s TikTok and YouTube channels.

Fronted by footballing legend Troy Deeney and renowned football YouTuber and presenter James Allcott, the seven-part digital-first series follows 12 of the UK’s most passionate football fanatics, who love creating content about the beautiful game on their social media channels, as they compete to become BBC Sport’s next big football content creator.

But they won’t be facing the challenge alone.

Joining the game are some of football and broadcasting’s most iconic figures, who will be setting tasks and offering expert insight. Star guests include Max Fosh, Martin Keown, Sami Mokbel, Rebecca Welch, Calum Leslie, Robbie Savage, Chris Sutton, Kelly Somers, Sean Dyche and Alex Scott.

These well-known names will be challenging the contestants to prove they have what it takes to inform, educate and entertain football fans across the UK.

Selected through BBC Creator Lab’s nationwide talent search — in collaboration with TikTok — the 12 contenders represent a new generation of digital-native football voices.

BBC Creator Lab is a talent search scheme, in collaboration with TikTok, for social and digital creators with an interest in developing a career in television.

The Last Pundit Standing line up has been confirmed as:

• Toby Addison @blindtobes
• Ally Tomlinson @ally.tom7
• Cathal Traquair @calluketraquair
• Fuad Abdul Aziz @vipersport
• Rukiah Ally @Rukiah.ally2
• Jess Watkins @_jesswatkins
• Raees Mahmood @pythaginboots
• Reggie Yembra @reggieyembra
• Nancy Baker @nancebaker
• Nahyan Chowdhury @nahyan.chowdhury
• Lia Lewis @lia.lewis
• Oscar Browning @oscarbrowning

Filmed at legendary football locations and packed with high-stakes challenges, Last Pundit Standing promises to bring fresh perspectives and exciting drama to the world of sports punditry.

Last Pundit Standing (7×20’) is a co-production between Boom Social (part of ITV Studios) and JLA Productions for BBC Three and BBC iPlayer. The series was commissioned by Fiona Campbell, BBC Controller of Youth Audience, BBC iPlayer and BBC Three, and Alex Kay-Jelski, BBC Director of Sport. The Commissioning Editor for the BBC is Nasfim Haque, Head of Content, BBC Three, with Ciara Murray and Maeve McLoughlin as BBC Commissioning Executives. Cai Morgan is Executive Producer for Boom, with Luke Rudland and Trent Williams-Jones as Series Producers and Katie Fazackerley Mason as Head of Production.

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Isabel Marant blended her signature softness with an edge for resort, in a collection that took notes from Victorian romanticism and 1980s attitude.

Building on the strong tailoring seen the previous season, artistic director Kim Bekker softened the silhouette ever so slightly with flowing fabrics, rounded shoulders, and subtle detailing such as lace and delicate, fabric-covered buttons.

Faux fur coats were cinched at the waist and came with voluminous, rounded sleeves as a nod to Victorian fashion, while leather jackets adopted an ’80s edge, softened by delicate embroidery and laser-cut floral patterns.

The collection leaned heavily into textiles for a relaxed, feminine feel: think washed cotton-linen blends, soft velvets, laser-cut lace, and guipure bobbin stitching motifs for added depth and dimension. Bekker played with prints, mixing Western-inspired and petite Victorian florals, as well as motifs in metallic studs.

The brand’s bestselling low-heeled, slouchy boot was reimagined this season with laser cutouts, in a cute heart motif or a half-moon shape that breathed with swish and movement.

Matching the men’s collection, colors were toned-down and dusty, such as a soft pink and a sandy beige.

Bekker said sales of accessories and jewelry have been strong across seasons, and faux fur coats from the winter collection sold particularly well. However, buyers are more cautious and seeking out essentials that strongly communicate the DNA of the brand.

“They want to have the total look, or the one iconic piece that really reflects the brand or the season,” she said. “And we try to play into this.”

Hence the new twists on Marant’s elevated classics that appeal across markets. The collection carried all the markers of the label’s Parisan cool-girl, boho chic look, with an on-trend cowboy edge.

Discover more Featured Stories like this in The Strad Playing Hub 

My cello studies began when I was seven years old after my parents surprised me by giving me a cello.  My mother died two years later, but my closeness to the cello has always had a profound resonance which strengthens the connection between my mother and me.  

When I was fifteen years old, my former teacher Joseph Saunders arranged for me to play for Starker in Bloomington, Indiana, where Starker taught since leaving the Chicago Symphony in 1959.

My father drove us to Bloomington on a cold Saturday in February 1965, and we went directly to Starker’s studio, room 155 in the round School of Music building at Indiana University. After he welcomed us, I played the Prelude and Allemande from the Sixth Cello Suite by Bach and a little of the Lalo Concerto.

Starker then said ’If an angel should come down and tell you that you could be anything you want, what would you say?’ I replied without hesitation ’I would say that I would like to be like you.’ He didn’t seem to mind my answer and invited my father and me to stay for his weekly masterclass.

A few of his students played in the class, and as always, Starker demonstrated to illustrate his comments. He also would talk to the students while he was playing, able to speak with clarity and play impeccably at the same time, a virtual impossibility for most human beings.

When the students finished, Starker looked at me and said ’Play the Prelude for us,’ which was totally unexpected. I realised later that this had been a test to see what would happen under that pressure. The Prelude is a very difficult piece, originally written for viola pomposa, an instrument with five strings, and I played it boldly. When I finished, Starker said ’It’s nice to know that there is good cello playing somewhere besides Bloomington.’ This comment was unusual from someone who almost always confined his remarks to critical observations and suggestions for improving technical issues.

Studying with Starker was astounding in every way. In just a few months, my playing became more relaxed and refined. I tried his patience many times by my inconsistent work ethic, but he always tried to be supportive while insisting on discipline. I had enormous respect for him but was not afraid to ask him to clarify instructions that I didn’t understand. When I did that, he would usually say ’What….I….said…was….,’ and then he would repeat it, slowly and with exaggerated simplicity. Even though he acted a little irritated, I know he was pleased that I was brave enough to ask him to repeat himself. After all, his goal was always to communicate and be understood. Starker became like a second father to me, treating me with firm but loving encouragement.

Starker became like a second father to me, treating me with firm but loving encouragement

At my second lesson, Starker asked me ’Are you left-handed?’ I replied that I was ambidextrous and that I played tennis and batted a baseball right-handed but wrote with my left hand and threw a ball with my left hand. Starker said ’I thought so. Don’t be the victim of the left-handed syndrome.’ So, I asked what that was, and he said ’You are always leading with your left hand and thinking about your left hand.’ Of course, he was absolutely right, and I often thought although most people are right-handed, I found it strange that all string instruments are bowed with the right arm because the demands required of the left hand seemed to far outweigh those of the bow. Clearly, I had no idea what I was doing with the bow, and I have been thinking about my right arm every day for the last 59 years.

After studying with Starker for a year, I played the first movement of Brahms F Major Sonata in a masterclass in Bloomington. Starker was joined by Mihaly Virizlay, a fine cellist and principal cellist of Baltimore Symphony. Virizlay had also been Starker’s first student when he was five and Starker was eight years old. In the months leading up to that summer I had listened to Starker and György Sebők’s recording of that Brahms Sonata dozens of times, and after playing it for the class, Virizlay said very dryly ’It sounded like a caricature of the record’ which elicited some gasps from the students who attended. After a moment, Starker said ’Well, everyone needs a point of departure.’ While it was something of an acknowledgement of Virizlay’s opinion, it also felt like he was defending me on some level, and I appreciated it.

When Piatigorsky was honoured by a special concert in Bloomington in 1967, Starker assigned me Piatigorsky’s own Variations on a Theme by Paganini, a treacherous and wonderful piece. In the weeks before the concert, my preparation was uneven, and Starker became a bit impatient with me, deservedly so. I survived the concert and on the whole, played fairly well. After the performance, I was walking in the hallway near the auditorium, and there was Piatigorsky, towering over Starker. As I passed, Piatigorsky said ’Bravo!’ I looked over at Starker. He gently slapped my face and said ’Idiot!’

On another occasion, I slept late and had to call Starker at 10:10 am to say ’I don’t know what happened. My alarm didn’t go off.’ He was not happy and said ’Well, I was here at 10. It was my first lesson of the day.’ This happened a couple of times. Then I was in a lesson playing the Schumann Concerto. We were going through the second movement, a glorious Andante. After the first long melodic statement, the orchestra plays a few chords leading to the cello entering with a poignant descending line of five notes. Starker said ’These five notes begin with “why?”, so tell me what words you would choose.’ I said right away ’Why am I like that?’ Starker looked at me and said ’That’s funny. I was thinking ”Why aren’t you HERE yet?”’ A great example of his humour as well as compassion toward me in a vulnerable moment.

During that time, it was arranged that I play in two of Starker’s masterclasses at Ravinia during the summer. I had prepared Divertimento by Haydn/Piatigorsky and the Vitali Chaconne in a transcription from the violin piece. As I drove north to Ravinia, I had a vivid feeling that my mother was in the passenger seat, and it was very comforting. I was scheduled to play first in the opening class, and Starker asked what I would play. I explained that I had the Divertimento and the Chaconne and planned to play the Chaconne in the first class.

Starker said ’Play the Haydn.’ I objected and said I was all set to play Chaconne, and Starker said ’What’s the matter? You nervous and want to begin with big, broad strokes?’ Then he turned to my pianist, indicated me and said ’Leave it to this guy to come up with the one piece I don’t play.’ Of course, I played the Haydn. Starker was very kind during the class and said ’It’s good to hear what you can do when you’ve been working. It was real cello playing.’ A few days later I played the Chaconne in another class, and Starker demonstrated parts of it flawlessly.

In 1993 I released my second solo CD, Jubilatum which opened with the Largo and Allegro Vivo from Francoeur’s Sonata in E Major, a piece I came to know at the age of thirteen on Starker’s record Around the World with Janos Starker: Music of France.

The next year in 1994 I was finally able to attend an Eva Janzer gathering. I arrived a day early and was invited to a small dinner party at the home of Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, Starker’s assistant in the 1960s and my teacher for two years in the early 1970s. I rarely drink alcohol, but I honoured Starker’s affection for Scotch by having some myself when I visited Bloomington. So, after Starker said some nice things about my new CD, I had enough courage to ask ’Did you hear any of yourself in my recording of Francoeur?’ His response: ’Well, it’s in tune.’ A perfect non-sentimental Starker answer and something of a compliment on a few levels.

Here is the Allegro Vivo from my Francoeur recording:

In 2001, Starker played a solo recital at Portland State University, and we played the Boccherini Duo and Popper Suite for two celli. The experience of playing duos with him was unforgettable, and fortunately it was videotaped, which you can see below:

Starker frequently would address everyone after the big dinner during the Eva Janzer gatherings. He would speak to all of us before leaving, getting emotional and expressing his appreciation for his huge ‘cello family’ and reminding us to stay true to ’the cause.’

Hamilton Cheifetz is professor emeritus and Florestan professor of cello at Portland State University and cellist of the Florestan Trio.

Images courtesy Hamilton Cheifetz.

 

Exhibition of the week

Emily Kam Kngwarray
A survey of this revered Australian painter who combined modern abstraction with maps of the Dreamtime.
Tate Modern, London, 10 July until 11 January

Also showing

Lindsey Mendick: Wicked Game
The flamboyant ceramicist takes a dive into the world of the Tudors with an installation in a castle once visited by Elizabeth I.
Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, 9 July until 31 October

Figure + Ground
Martin Creed, Sonia Boyce, Paul McCarthy and more in a group show of film and video art.
Hauser and Wirth, London, until 2 August

Movements for Staying Alive
Yvonne Rainer, Ana Mendieta and Harold Offeh star in a participatory celebration of body art.
Modern Art Oxford, until 7 September

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
This Roma-Polish artist portrays her community in bold and colourful textiles.
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 7 September

Image of the week

It’s a marvellous night for a moondance – with the pink dolphins tripping the light fantastic with the local mermaids – in the Amazon. Peruvian artist Santiago Yahuarcani creates his works by applying paint prepared from pigments, seeds, leaves and roots, to large sheets of llanchama, a cloth made from the bark of the ojé tree. His works are often inspired by the hallucinations brought on by the ritual ingestion of tobacco, coca, ayahuasca and mushrooms – substances long used by the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon when in search of help, knowledge or revelation. His show, The Beginning of Knowledge is at the Whitworth, Manchester, as part of Manchester International festival. Read our interview with him here.

What we learned

Sam Cox AKA Mr Doodle is the million-dollar artist who almost lost himself to his alter ego

Not all statues of footballers are as terrible as the infamous Ronaldo bust

Jenny Saville’s raw, visceral portraits are inspiring a fresh generation of schoolkids

Indigenous art from around the world is sweeping galleries across the UK

A once derelict district of Medellín, Colombia has has been rebuilt as a green haven

Khaled Sabsabi will show at Venice Biennale after controversial sacking was rescinded

Masterpiece of the week

An Allegory, by an anonymous Florentine artist, about 1500

This painting celebrates childbirth and motherhood, but subversively. Mothers were often depicted as the Virgin Mary nursing Christ in medieval and Renaissance art. It was a form of religious manipulation, associating a typical female experience of the age with piety and love of Christ. This woman however lies powerfully and calmly in a meadow while her babies play around her. It is a pagan scene, shorn of Christian symbols. In a pose apparently inspired by Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, a strong, even divine maternal figure, who resembles Venus, holds sway over the onlooker.
National Gallery

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Monday

As someone who enjoys the women’s tennis at Wimbledon, so to speak, the tournament’s opening days are an annual joy and this week has been electric. Emma Raducanu leads the rise in British women powering up the world rankings, which makes the era of women’s tennis I grew up in – I have a lot of time for Jo Durie, but those were hard years – seem like the 19th century. Today, after two stunning opening-round matches, Raducanu will meet Aryna Sabalenka, the mighty Belarusian world No 1, which means tomorrow I will be on court one (in the park) knocking imaginary clay dust from my shoes and pretending to be in the final.

If the tennis is sublime, the crowd so far has been slightly under par – although it’s early days. Last year, the title of Wimbledon best dressed went, for my money, to Greta Gerwig, wearing a tan suit the provenance of which I still can’t track down, as well as Zendaya in Ralph Lauren and Julia Roberts in Gucci. This week in the royal box and around the grounds we’ve had Cate Blanchett, who is welcome in any setting, Olivia Rodrigo and Russell Crowe, who combed his hair and dug out a tie for Centre Court. (Esquire ran a story about the £65,000 Rolex he was wearing, which, if it was intended to set us against him, won’t work – I won’t hear a word against Rusty.)

There were also, as usual, a high turn out of what my teenage tennis partner and I used to refer to nastily as Midweek Ladies, a crowd who, off-court, wear floral, ankle length dresses in pale shades and on court, are always one double fault away from losing their nerve and reverting to an underhand serve.

Tuesday

Everyone should watch My Mom Jayne, the documentary about Jayne Mansfield made by her daughter Mariska Hargitay, released this week on HBO Max and a jaw-dropper of revelations and sadness. You may know Hargitay from her role as Detective Olivia Benson in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – I didn’t even know she was Mansfield’s daughter. She was three years old in 1967 when her 34-year-old mother was killed in a car crash outside New Orleans.

The film is heartbreaking, not least because Hargitay, who has no memories of her mother, was in the car with her siblings when it crashed. All three children survived and were raised by their father but, as Hargitay reports, she grew up feeling vaguely ashamed of her mother, a Hollywood sex bomb who spoke in a breathy voice that a generation later fell out of usage. As Hargitay digs into the history of the mother she never knew, she discovers Mansfield was an accomplished pianist and violinist, a brilliant, ambitious woman trapped by the only persona Hollywood allowed her – until now.

Wednesday

Finally, someone has greeted the release of a new Brad Pitt movie not with praise-be gratitude for America’s ageing sweetheart, but by looking at Pitt’s success in shrugging off an allegation of domestic abuse. While in most of the entertainment press, Pitt’s new film is treated to the customary chuckling puff piece, New York magazine runs the headline Brad Pitt is Fooling You and proceeds to get into it: the actor’s image preservation, the crisis management PR he retains (former client: Johnny Depp) and the details of Angelina Jolie’s allegation that he assaulted her and one of their children on a private plane.

As the piece concludes, nobody cares. There’s been a vibe shift since #MeToo, which, let’s not forget, Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, aligned itself with by co-producing the movie adaptation of She Said, about the exposing of Harvey Weinstein – a sterling piece of allyship from America’s most sensitive male feminist, or something else entirely. Either way, nothing sticks. In the last five years, the worst coverage Pitt has had is for Bullet Train.

Thursday

There was a story in the Sun mid-week about Pitt’s ex Jennifer Aniston, or rather, about a 43-year-old man from Southampton who believed himself to be in a Facebook relationship with the Hollywood star, who had reached out to him asking for a loan.

That might have been your first clue, Paul, that something about this – hard to put your finger on what exactly – didn’t smell right. It wasn’t the first time the unfortunate victim had been targeted over social media by scam accounts claiming to be Hollywood stars. But when “Jennifer Aniston” sent him a copy of her driving licence, along with the message “I love you”, it was enough to clinch things and convince the hapless Facebook user he was at the start of a beautiful relationship. As requested, he sent the former Friends star the £200 of Apple gift cards she was asking for and never heard from her again.

Friday

Oh, to have the confidence of the Dalai Lama that we’ll all get a second go-around. Before his 90^th birthday this weekend, the Tibetan spiritual leader discussed arrangements for his successor, by which, per Buddhist beliefs, he means the body into which he will be reincarnated. This is as much a political as a spiritual consideration and in his address the Dalai Lama pushed back against the Chinese government’s insistence on pre-approving the reincarnation, remaining firm that when the time comes, he’ll be reincarnated in line with Tibetan tradition and without interference from Beijing.

He has also dangled some spoilers, suggesting, tantalisingly, that the new Dalai Lama may not be a baby, as he was, and – in what would represent a reboot more shocking than the new Doctor Who and Ghostbusters combined – may not even be male. Which goes to show that even spiritual leaders these days have a canny knack for PR.

At a moment when all online images are flowing into one machine-learning algorithm or another, it is easy to foresee the convergence of old canons of painting, photography, and film into an undifferentiated field of digital “slop”. Notwithstanding the implications for the precarious life of the cultural producer, this state of artificial intelligence (AI) affairs also augurs a world in which humans lack oversight over the production of images, which increasingly emerge from the latent space of accumulated data in AI models.

A number of artists have sought to halt the onset of consequent cultural blindness by calling attention to the ways technical systems shape social realities. The new machine-assisted paintings by Simon Denny, who was recently appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, address the “illegibility” of image generation in the age of AI, when history is all “jumbled up”. the artist’s two new series, presented with the gallery Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler at the JW Marriott Hotel Berlin, overlooking a hub for the German Ministry of Defence, play on the militarised rhetoric of Italian Futurism as well as cubism’s attempt to capture multiple perspectives simultaneously.

For Denny, “there is no such thing as offline and online, we’re always both,” which heightens the relevance of the historical avant-garde to a world of multi-channel experience as well as to a moment of rearmament in Europe. By using mechanical plotters to execute his paintings, Denny not only highlights generative AI as a machine for manufacturing history, he also aligns the canon of painting with that of computational art. In the process, he embraces the hybrid reality of an art world where both analogue and digital media live together, one that is crying out for work that embraces plurality without being nebulous.

Denny is not alone in treating painting as one strand of a wider transmedia strategy. The California-born artist Sara Ludy has built a career engineering porousness between media: from sculpture to video to virtual reality. Her recent exhibition of paintings at Smart Objects, Los Angeles, expressed the lingering effects of screen-based experience on life lived in the New Mexico desert. In a recent interview, she acknowledged painting through a “postdigital” lens: “The way I perceive light, space, and surface is shaped by years spent working in that [screen-centred] realm. Even if I’m not actively engaging with digital tools, that lens is embedded in how I see and make.”

Of course, that lens is also financialised, politicised, and militarised, which has prompted the German media artist and film-maker Hito Steyerl to ask, with the release of her new book Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat(2025): “In an age where most images have become operational, […] what can an inoperative image be?” With machine learning now being used to enhance the precision and autonomy of drone operations, artists are helping to maintain public focus on the opaque domain of nonhuman vision. For the Montreal-born New York-based artist Chris Dorland, “Art can’t necessarily stop the machinery, but it can expose its limits […] Technical error becomes a rupture in the smooth interface — a break in the fantasy.” The title of his recent exhibition at Nicoletti Contemporary, Clone Repo (server ruin), refers to the practice of downloading files stored online to a local hard drive. Bathed in the glow of its central LED monolith displaying degraded screen grabs from Tik Tok and Instagram against a “dead server sound bath” by Leon Louder, the show appeals to the urge to evade systems of surveillance. It also relocates glitch aesthetics from the screen to a new series of paintings, subverting one form of seduction after another while validating multimedia practice.

Even a painter’s painter such as the Canadian-American Tim Kent has absorbed digital modes of visualisation, building compositions out of vector graphics that stress the Cartesian roots of military viewfinders. Kent was part of Fever Dream, a group show in May at Studio Underground, New York, curated by Julianna Vezzetti and Xandra Beverlin, whose works register as postdigital aftershocks. A case in point is the California-born Petra Cortright, whose contributions to the show included a painting on anodized aluminium titled Athos adress Internet communication_bank foreclosures banjo-kazooie stratagy(2021) that turns a greyscale grid into an emergent field of indeterminate flora and fauna.

If such works exemplify painting from a digital place, the London-based Diana Taylor’s forthcoming show of paintings at Don’t Look Projects, Los Angeles, comes from the opposite direction. Layering the graphical matrix of Gustave Doré’s engravings together with a surfeit of other patterns over a pixellated bitmap, the artist makes legible the collapse of analogue and digital organising principles that AI obscures.

If canonical histories of linear progress are no longer wholly credible, it is still possible to identify fertile zones at the borders of art, technology, and design. The decision of Jenna Basso Pietrobon to step away from the New York art scene has fuelled a practice that evades categorisation. Having returned to the town of Nove, in the Veneto, northeast Italy, where her grandparents produced ceramic lamps, she has developed a practice that unsettles the slip-casting process by removing clay from its mould prematurely and stacking the unhardened geometrical forms. Cohering through chance and manual craft, the illuminated outcomes sit uneasily between sculpture and design.

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby anticipated this world of hybrid objects by uncoupling product design from function and reframing it as a forum in which to speculate on possible futures. Following the corporate conversion of speculative design into a vehicle for fetishising the future, the duo’s new book Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought, Impossibility, and the Design Imagination (2025) asks “[w]hat it means to design at a time when, for many people, the future seems to have become an impossibility.”

The answer, it seems, is a form of reworlding that uses all forms of media to envision sustainable alternatives. One of Dunne and Raby’s former students, Deborah Tchoudjinoff, was part of a recent exhibition at Hypha Studios in London, titled The Geological Unconscious. Curated by Julie F Hill and Susan Eyre, the show entangled multiple media to explore worlds of more-than-human experience. Tchoudjinoff’s work The City of Gold (2022) speculates on the Anthropocene, incorporating the physical fragments of a fictional supercontinent visualised in a nearby virtual world. While Eyre’s installation Lithos Panoptes (2025) refracts a video of human activity through a series of lenses, capturing the molecular structure of magnetite while revealing the mineral’s view of the world.

Palmer Gallery, in London, attempted something similar through its recent show Handful of Dust which considered sand as a mnemonic material and shapeshifting archive, slowing the spectator’s journey by situating them in a space of primordial experience. In this context, Li Li Ren stood out for her use of 3D-modelling software to develop a series of sculptures — from dismembered arms to desiccated topographies — that expressed the distribution of the body across physical and digital, and human and nonhuman domains.

At a moment when art’s legacy structures are giving way to a new border economy, work like Ren’s can help to ensure that AI and generative media do not create a state of unresolvable impasse but instead engineer a place where analogue and digital media live together in a rich field of hybrid creativity.

All the same, few comic characters were as militant as Superman. In one early issue, he demolishes a row of slum homes in order to force the authorities to build better housing (a risky strategy, that one). In another, he takes on the city’s gambling industry because it is bankrupting addicts. And in another, he declares war on everyone he sees as being responsible for traffic-related deaths. He terrifies reckless drivers, he abducts the mayor who hasn’t enforced traffic laws, he smashes up the stock of a second-hand car dealer, and he wrecks a factory where faulty cars are assembled. “It’s because you use inferior metals and parts so as to make higher profits at the cost of human lives,” he informs the owner. Were Superman’s direct-action protest campaigns strictly legal? No, but they were riotous, boldly political fun – and almost 90 years on, they stand as a fascinating street-level account of US urban life in the 1930s.

NEW YORK — “Don’t Look Back in Anger” is good advice for the Britpop band Oasis, who launch their surprising reunion tour today in Cardiff, Wales.

Led by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, the reunion marks the end of the siblings’ long-held feud, one that led to Oasis disbanding in 2009. For many fans, this news is almost too good to be true. They’re anxiously awaiting whether the Gallaghers will indeed make it through the entire run of international dates and even perhaps extend the reunion.

Whether they’re in it for the long haul or will call it quits at some point sooner (hopefully not before they reach the Rose Bowl Sept. 6 and 7), here’s a look at a few other very famous — but very brief — band reunions.

The Beach Boys

DISBANDED: Technically, they never broke up. Read on.

HOW LONG THE REUNION LASTED: A few months in 2012.

WHAT HAPPENED: There is no linear history when it comes to the Beach Boys, but here’s the abridged: Band members came and went, and the band’s visionary, the late Brian Wilson, retired from touring in 1964 following a breakdown caused by stress and exhaustion. His place was soon filled by Bruce Johnston, who remained with the group for decades. Wilson also infamously feuded with his cousin and bandmate Mike Love over songwriting credits for years.

The question here is: Can a band that never broke up reunite? In this case, yes: The band — with both Wilson and Love — got together for a new album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” and world tour in 2012, celebrating the band’s 50th anniversary. It wasn’t the whole original lineup, however: Drummer Dennis Wilson died in 1983, and guitarist Carl Wilson died in 1998.

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: The force behind the band, Brian Wilson, died last month at age 82, but Love continues to tour under the Beach Boys name.

Led Zeppelin

DISBANDED: 1980

HOW LONG THE REUNION LASTED: Good question. The band played a few one-off events in the mid-1980s throughout the ’00s, never embarking on a reunion tour. So, a few days? A few hours?

WHAT HAPPENED: Led Zeppelin disbanded immediately following the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980, reuniting only for a select few events in the decades that followed. Most notably, their first show back was a complicated set at Live Aid in 1985 in Philadelphia. Lead singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones’ last performance together was in 2007 at the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert held in London’s O2 Arena. There, Bonham’s son Jason Bonham played the drums. Page and Plant had a separate band together that released a couple of albums in the ‘90s.

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: Highly unlikely. The band has successfully evaded reunion requests in the past, including one from President Bill Clinton. In 2013, Clinton asked the British rock greats to get back together for the 2012 Superstorm Sandy benefit concert in New York City. He asked; they said no.

Nirvana

DISBANDED: 1994

HOW LONG THE REUNION LASTED: A series of one-off performances in the 2010s and 2020s.

WHAT HAPPENED: Nirvana disbanded following the death of frontman and principal songwriter Kurt Cobain. Its members pursued other projects — most notably, drummer Dave Grohl founded the Foo Fighters. But two decades after Cobain’s death, in 2014, Nirvana was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, so bassist Krist Novoselic, touring guitarist Pat Smear (of the Germs) and Grohl got together for a short set — joined by Lorde, St. Vincent, Joan Jett and Kim Gordon on vocals for a reunion dubbed “Hervana.”

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: Maybe there could be a few more gigs here and there? Novoselic and Grohl reunited for a few one-off performances in the years that followed, most recently coming together for the Fire Aid benefit concert in Los Angeles and the 50th anniversary celebrations for “Saturday Night Live,” both this year. At the latter, Post Malone took over vocal duties.

Oasis

DISBANDED: 2009

HOW LONG THE REUNION IS SUPPOSED TO LAST: If the band makes it through their full run of reunion shows, July through November. So, five months.

WHAT HAPPENED: Good question. The band — and in particular, the Gallagher brothers — have not released a public statement giving specific reasons for the reunion. But the initial tour announcement did seem to allude to past tensions. “The guns have fallen silent,” Oasis said. “The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.”

In 2019, Liam Gallagher told the Associated Press he was ready to reconcile.

“The most important thing is about me and him being brothers,” he said of Noel. “He thinks I’m desperate to get the band back together for money. But I didn’t join the band to make money. I joined the band to have fun and to see the world.”

Fans had long theorized a reunion might be on the horizon, too: In the wake of the 2017 bombing that killed 22 at an Ariana Grande concert in Oasis’ hometown of Manchester, Liam Gallagher performed at a benefit concert. He criticized his brother’s absence, but a spokesperson said Noel Gallagher couldn’t attend because of a long-standing family trip. Benefit organizers said Noel Gallagher approved the use of Oasis’ music and donated royalties from “Don’t Look Back in Anger” to the British Red Cross’ One Love Manchester fund.

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: It’s happening. A better question is: What are the chances of a new album? That’s impossible to know.

Outkast

DISBANDED: They never officially disbanded, so call it a hiatus. They never released another album after 2006’s “Idlewild,” and 2007 is frequently cited as the year they officially took a break.

HOW LONG THE REUNION LASTED: A few months in 2014? They announced reunion dates in January 2014, played their first in April, and ended that October.

WHAT HAPPENED: At the top of 2014, Outkast — the innovative Atlanta-based hip-hop duo consisting of Big Boi and André 3000 — announced they would tour festivals around the world to mark 20 years of their band, following a near-decade-long hiatus. The dates began at Coachella, where the duo headlined both Friday night shows. Then they made their way to their home state of Georgia for the CounterPoint Music & Arts Festival, which the AP described as “an energetic show that kept the crowd jamming in the late hours.”

Once the reunion shows were done, so was Outkast. Big Boi continued to release solo records, and André 3000 would follow suit … almost 10 years later, when he released his debut solo full-length album, the flute-forward “New Blue Sun,” in 2023.

“New Blue Sun” has “no bars,” he joked to AP shortly after it was released. It’s a divergence from rap because “there was nothing I was liking enough to rap about, or I didn’t feel it sounded fresh.”

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: When asked about new Outkast music, André 3000 told AP, “I never say never. … But I can say that the older I get, I feel like that time has happened.”

The Velvet Underground

DISBANDED: 1973, more or less.

HOW LONG THE REUNION LASTED: A few months in 1993.

WHAT HAPPENED: Here’s another opaque one for you, as band reunions so often tend to be: John Cale was ousted in 1968, Lou Reed left in 1970 and the Velvet Underground slowly dissolved from there, releasing their final album, “Squeeze,” in 1973. In 1990, Cale and Reed joined forces to release an album in homage to Andy Warhol, “Songs for Drella,” opening the door for a future reunion. There were a few one-off performances, and then the band toured Europe in 1993, including a performance at Glastonbury.

CHANCES OF GETTING BACK TOGETHER: It is pretty much impossible. Reed died in 2013. Guitarist Sterling Morrison died in 1995. And Nico died in 1988.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.