A new renaissance? Yes, we need it. Raise your hand if you’ve felt bored by entertainment lately. Raise your other hand if you’ve surrendered to the algorithm, letting Spotify spoon-feed you the same six songs you didn’t even really like in the first place. Raise your middle hand if find yourself wanting a cultural reset. Good. Now put them down
What can art accomplish that explanation cannot? Fiction by Jack Norman
Every so often, an artist comes along who doesn’t just make work that resonates in the moment but creates something so singular, so undeniably magnetic, that it ripples outward, shaping generations of artists to come. Damon Albarn is one of those figures. Not just a musician, but a designer of cultural shifts—someone who saw where things were going before anyone
In a cavernous gallery, monochromatic light pulses with mathematical precision. A bass frequency hums beneath the skin, felt before heard. The room vibrates—not just with sound, but with the sensation of perception itself shifting. This is unicolor (2014), one of Carsten Nicolai’s many experiments in sensory thresholds, where cognition collides with the unseen forces that shape it. The work is
It begins as a joke. A voice, clipped and didactic, instructs: “How not to be seen? Become invisible.” The image shudders—low-resolution, a ghost of a file, a degraded pixel smear. Then: a military testing site in California’s Mojave Desert. The camera hovers over numbered targets, relics from an era when satellites learned to identify bodies from the sky. A green-screened
A Voice That Follows You You hear her before you see her. A voice, close enough to brush your ear, but with a disorienting absence of breath, an uncanny lack of weight. You turn, but she isn’t there. The crowd moves past in the half-light of Central Park, and you realize that the woman speaking is both beside you and
This Is Not Music
4 February 2025