May 14 – June 18, 2022

The story of long-forgotten 16th-Century musical genius Vicente Lusitano

April 26 – June 18, 2022

May 13 – June 18, 2022

Why the enigmatic star's mystical songs are being constantly re-purposed

The event that created a myth

April 28 – June 18, 2022

May 14 – June 18, 2022

Buzz Lightyear's origin film has a 'gloomy setting' and 'depressing storyline'

How Steven Spielberg's film about a loveable alien stands up, forty years on

How musicians are using hip-hop as a form of protest

How videogame music plays our emotions

The final of the two trilogies is 'packed with silliness, spectacle, romance'

How Marvel has struck gold with a young Muslim superhero

March 19 – June 12, 2022

April 26 – June 12, 2022

I made Cold Dark Matter in 1991 for the Chisenhale Gallery in East London. It’s a dark space with no natural light, so I wanted to make something that had its own light source. I was making a series of works about things having almost a cartoon death—falling off a cliff, getting blown up, steamrolled, burned. I said to the curator, Jonathan Watkins, that I wanted to blow something up in the space. There were a lot of explosions happening in cities at this time, because of the IRA [Irish Republican Army], so that’s what gave me the idea. He had just laid a new polished concrete floor, so he talked me out of that.

I would have loved to blow up a house, but that wasn’t practical. I decided that a garden shed is the kind of place where all the stuff from the house gets dumped anyway. It’s full of psychological baggage. Jonathan asked me who I wanted to have blow it up, and I suggested the British Army. Jonathan phoned them up, and they said we should come to the Army School of Ammunition in Banbury. By the time we got there, they’d already decided to do it. I had some shed-builders construct a composite shed for me. The objects came from boot sales where people were selling things from their own sheds. A few friends gave me things from their sheds, like pushchairs and motorbikes. It was a bit of a crowd-sourced piece in a way.

We did the explosion in a big open field. The Army treated it like another exercise. A few friends came along, plus some journalists. Major Doug Hewitt, who oversaw the project, was there. Sadly, he has died, but I still keep in touch with his daughters. There was also a group of Kenyan soldiers who were there training; they were very puzzled. The major said, “Oh, this is what we do in Britain—we have this ritual where we blow up sheds.” It was so funny; everyone was having a joke. It was quite joyous.

The show at Chisenhale was two weeks after the explosion. The materials got taken straight to the gallery and laid out on the floor. It smelled of explosives and looked very menacing, as if a disaster had happened. Once we put the work in the air, it stopped being like a morgue and became more like a dynamic display. I also didn’t realize how much the shadows would play into the work. That was really lovely to see.

—As told to Leigh Anne Miller

Ethereum, the crypto-currency on which most NFTs are minted, dropped below $1,800 Friday, its lowest value in over a year. It’s a far cry from its peak in the high $4,000s last November. 

With the drop, the mourning has begun, even among a crypto-community used to weathering the asset’s volatility. NFT platforms, however, are not wading through the five stages of grief before taking action.

In quick succession, major NFT platforms like Foundation, SuperRare, and OpenSea have announced major changes to the way they run their businesses. 

While none of these pivots has been explicitly labeled as a response to the market, the timing and nature of the new initiatives seem designed to make up for the lack of enthusiasm in the market currently.

Take Foundation, for example. 

Early on in Crimes of the Future, filmmaker David Cronenberg’s newly released big return to body horror, a man named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) has his chest opened up for a rapt audience. A machine with fast-moving scalpels pulls apart his stomach and reveals his innards to the crowd. Meanwhile, his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) paces around the room, fingering a squishy gadget with blinking lights to control this surgery, which serves no medical purpose. All the while, Saul moans and writhes, perhaps in pleasure, perhaps in pain, perhaps in a mix of the two.

Could this makeshift surgery be considered art? At least within the film’s world, yes. Caprice labels herself as a performance artist, though Saul is not merely her subject — he is a collaborator unto himself, and he considers his organs his creations.

While this may all seem rather strange, Crimes of the Future is, in fact, couched in recent art history. It draws on a kind of performance art in which artists use their body as their material, subjecting themselves to particularly painful situations that have involved bloodletting and the modification of their skin.

“Twenty years ago when I wrote this script, there were lots of performance artists of various kinds,” Cronenberg told critic Amy Taubin in an Artforum interview this week. “Once you have it in your head that something exists, that artists were compelled to make those performance works and that there was an audience for them, that frees you to invent what you’re going to invent.”