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    Can We Make Pop Culture Great Again?

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    When “Wicked” and “Gladiator II” debuted together late last month, there was a painful attempt to call their shared box office success “Glicked” — a reference to the portmanteau of “Barbenheimer” that described the joint cultural triumph of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” in the summer of 2023.It was painful because the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon was a genuine old-fashioned Hollywood success story: Two unusual and vivid and original stories (based, yes, on real history and a famous doll, but no less creative for all that) from directors working near the peak of their powers that managed to be culturally relevant and open for interpretive debate.Whereas “Wicked” and the “Gladiator” sequel are conventional examples of how Hollywood makes almost all its money nowadays — through safe-seeming bets on famous brands and franchises that can be packaged into just-OK-enough cinematic entertainments. Neither is as egregiously mediocre as “Moana 2,” the other blockbuster of the season: The musical numbers in “Wicked” and Denzel Washington’s Roman scenery-chewing lend energy that’s absent in the Disney empire nowadays. But neither are anything like the expression of mass-market creativity that we used to call The Movies.I’ve been writing lately about how American politics seem to have moved into a new dispensation — more unsettled and extreme, but also perhaps more energetic and dynamic. One benefit of unsettlement, famously adumbrated by Orson Welles’s villainous Harry Lime in “The Third Man,” is supposed to be cultural ferment: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”There are certainly signs of ferment out there, in technology, religion and intellectual life. But I’m worried about pop culture — worried that the relationship between art and commerce isn’t working as it should, worried that even if the rest of American society starts moving, our storytelling is still going to be stuck.Or maybe not stuck so much as completely fragmented, with forms of creativity that are all intensely niche, like the podcast-splintered marketplace of news consumption.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Ubiquity of ‘Wicked’ Shows How Commercial Needs are Consuming Culture

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      Even before “Wicked” opened, the movie’s signature green and pink colors were turning up everywhere, from drinks topped with matcha foam at Starbucks to aisles lined with merch at Target. This cultural bludgeoning was, of course, orchestrated. Today, not even large marketing budgets can achieve such ubiquity without help.Attention has become fractured. Audiences, siloed in their social-media feeds and choose-your-own-adventure streaming sites, are ever harder to reach. Only by partnering up, like “Barbie” did by collaborating with 165 brands last year, can a promotional campaign become truly inescapable. “Wicked” went even bigger, teaming up with over 400 brands to ensure a saturation that would be, in the words of Universal Pictures’ chief marketing officer Michael Moses, “just short of obnoxious.”It’s just the latest example of how the culture industry has come to rely on collaborations. Brands pair up with other brands in endless permutations. Fashion companies and visual artists routinely partner, as in the case of Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami, whose landmark collaboration will soon relaunch. Around a third of Billboard’s Hot 100 songs involve a guest feature or collab (compared to under 10 percent a generation ago). At a time when culture feels stagnant, collaborations help artists and brands generate an air of originality without having to innovate.This frisson of newness has often been enough to capture media attention and entice consumers. But as commercial alliances have proliferated, their effect has diminished. Fatigue is setting in. “Wicked” participated in more than twice as many collaborations as “Barbie,” yet brought in only half its opening-weekend box-office take worldwide.Could it be that we’ve reached “peak collab?”Collaborations have become formulaic, fusing random elements from all corners of culture, until everything seems fungible: Baccarat and Hello Kitty, Louvre and “Joker: Folie à Deux,” N.H.L. and Lululemon, M&M’s and KateSpade. The ease with which such diverse offerings are lumped together only exacerbates the feeling of monotony and exhaustion. All culture is deployed in the same way, as if what distinguishes it — its history, form, industry or genre — couldn’t matter less. Collaborations appear increasingly desperate, more about profit than creative synergy or shared values. Louis Vuitton’s upcoming Murakami re-edition promises to be “a surefire sales smash,” as Highsnobiety put it, even if it’s also “a cash-conscious maneuver reflective of tumbling luxury revenues.”But the formula plays well to the algorithms that power social media and dictate what we see online. Designed to anticipate what we want, these algorithms favor content with a proven history — the safe and familiar over the experimental and untested. New content composed of pre-existing elements, like mash-ups of established artists and brands, hits the sweet spot. This preference has only amplified the incentives leading culture away from the lone visionary and toward joint authorship for decades. In hip-hop, guest features started as a means of creative exchange before proving their value as a commercial draw.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Year in Review

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      As critics issue their year-end lists, we want to know your personal favorites of 2024.It’s the most wonderful time of year, and I don’t mean the holiday season, although I’ve heard that people are excited about that too. No, for nerds like me who love to plan out their holiday culture consumption — those whose appetites are always far larger than their capacity for viewing/reading/listening — December is sacred because it is when critics issue their retrospective best-of lists, their verdicts on the best movies, music, TV, books and other cultural artifacts of 2024.I’ve always thought it a shame that everyone I know doesn’t issue a best-of list. Yes, critics are experts in their fields, completists who have surveyed the landscape of their beats such that their assessments of “the best” are far more informed than the average cultural consumer’s. But I also want to know what my friends and family loved, and why. There’s no easier way to get to know someone a little bit more deeply than by asking them for a recommendation. I have a fantasy of pulling out a bullhorn on my morning commute and asking everyone in my subway car their top five films of the year. I’m not sure anyone would play along with my reindeer game, but if they did, I expect that I’d get a few good recs, some truly nutty ones, and that it would certainly bring a spirit of joy and conviviality to a typically alienating part of the day.And why stop at the usual categories? Best-of lists are typically limited to the same categories. Tell me your favorite movie, book and song, but I also want to know the best line of poetry you read this year, the best cocktail you devised, the best tradition you started, the best grilling technique, the best piece of advice you received. We’re all living and exploring and absorbing.And so I ask you, as I do every year, to send in your own highly specific, idiosyncratic, genre-free favorites from 2024. What did you discover? What did you learn? What did you love? Submit your answers here, and I’ll include as many of them as I can in upcoming newsletters.For moreThe Morning readers’ bests of 2023 and 2022.The best advice Morning readers received in 2023 and 2022.“As with everything worth making — bread, sweet love, mix tapes — there’s an art to creating a great Top 10 list.” From 2011, Dan Kois on how and why to make a best-of list.The Times’s best of 2024 lists.More year-end lists from around the internet.THE WEEK IN CULTUREFilm and TVAmy Adams in a scene from “Nightbitch.”Searchlight Pictures, via Associated Press“Nightbitch,” which stars Amy Adams as a stay-at-home mother who turns into a feral dog, is one of the movies Times critics are talking about this week.“The Agency” on Paramount + and Netflix’s “Black Doves” are part of a new crop of spy dramas whose biggest battles take place within the hearts and minds of their agents.ArtThe discovery of a rare picture of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, made by his lover Paul Verlaine, prompted a bidding war in Paris.At New York’s Grolier Club, an exhibition renders physical representations of lost or unfinished works by writers including Ernest Hemingway and Christopher Marlowe.More CultureJean-Charles de CastelbajacAlain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Notre-Dame Cathedral reopens, the clergy will be wearing new liturgical garb designed by the French designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.The most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction — a stegosaurus that went for almost $45 million — has a new home at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.The two remaining defendants in the case against Young Thug’s rap label YSL were found not guilty of murder and gang charges.THE LATEST NEWSWar in SyriaRebel fighters in the streets of Hama on Friday.Bakr Al Kassem/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRebels fighting to depose Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, advanced on another major city en route to the capital. The sudden intensification of the war has led neighboring countries to close their borders.Iran, which for years has helped Assad maintain control of Syria, is now evacuating military personnel from the country.The leader of Syria’s rebel groups told The Times that he was confident his fighters could oust Assad. “This operation broke the enemy,” he said.Other Big StoriesA vote on whether to impeach South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, slowed to a crawl as the opposition tried to convince members of his party to support the ouster of the president.A federal judge ruled that the U.S. Naval Academy can consider race and ethnicity in admissions, asserting that affirmative action was essential to protect national security.A panel of federal judges upheld a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells the app. Donald Trump opposes the ban.The U.S. Department of Agriculture will begin testing the nation’s milk supply for the bird flu virus.Police officers now believe the man who shot the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in Manhattan escaped from the city that day. Investigators recovered a backpack in Central Park similar to the one he was carrying.CULTURE CALENDAR📺 “Somebody Somewhere” (Sunday): In the second season of this HBO half-hour, a character graces a potluck with St. Louis sushi, a delicacy that combines ham, pickles and cream cheese. It’s delicious. And tough on the gut. That’s also true of this riotously funny, achingly tender comedy created by Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen and Bridget Everett. Everett stars as Sam, a woman who returns in middle age to her Manhattan, Kan., hometown. A sweet and salty heartbreaker about family found and chosen, this show will end its three-season run on Sunday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. 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      The Kennedy Center’s Chairman Won’t Depart After All

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      As the nation’s capital prepares for a second Trump administration, the performing arts center announced that its chairman would not step down in January as planned.The White House was not the only Washington institution planning to welcome new leadership in January. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts had announced that its longtime board chairman, David M. Rubenstein, would step down in January and had appointed a search committee to find a successor.But last month, shortly after the presidential election, the Kennedy Center announced that Mr. Rubenstein, a private equity titan who has led its board of 14 years, would stay on in the position until September 2026.The decision ensures continuity at a moment when the Kennedy Center, like much of Washington, is preparing for a second Trump administration. (On Sunday, President Biden is expected to attend the Kennedy Center Honors as it celebrates Francis Ford Coppola, the Grateful Dead and Bonnie Raitt; President-elect Donald J. Trump did not attend the ceremonies during his first term.) But it also raises questions about why the center failed to find a new chair.Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president, said that on Nov. 15 the board’s search committee decided to keep Mr. Rubenstein on in part because the center is in the quiet phase of an endowment campaign, making a leadership transition “really tough.”“We looked at the needs of the Kennedy Center in a variety of different ways moving forward,” she said in an interview. “It is important for us to have somebody who knows the center and who knows and can play the leadership role that we need.”Mr. Rubenstein, a co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, has given the center $111 million over the years. He was initially appointed by former President George W. Bush. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Notre-Dame Reopens in Paris After a Fire. It’s Astonishing.

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      Benoist de Sinety, former vicar general of Paris, was on his scooter that April evening in 2019, driving across the Pont Neuf toward the Left Bank when he spotted flames in his rearview mirror billowing from under the eaves of Notre-Dame. He cursed, made a U-turn and sped toward the cathedral. Mary Queen of Scots […] More

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      Issa Lopez on Fear and Horror in Fiction and in Real Life

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      Fictional fear can be beautifully distracting from life’s real terrors.This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.Turning Point: The American horror film genre more than doubled its market share in the past decade.As a Mexican — specifically a Mexican child who had to face death early in my life — I learned a nifty trick pretty quickly: the way my culture transfigures fear of death into art. Into storytelling. Into music.Mexican identity is one and the same with death. It is a direct response to the fear of vanishing, yes. But it took some years of living in the United States and in several other countries to understand that this is not just a Mexican thing.All artistic endeavors throughout history, around the world, come from the same source. We tell stories to remain. To deny the void. To fight the void. We sing and dance and make movies and tell jokes to explain a bit of the unexplainable, to tame the endless darkness, all of the things that lurk beyond what we can see, the shadows beyond our tiny campfire.Our relationship with fear is fascinating. It is the feeling, other than pain, that we hate the most. We bottle fear to consume in tiny doses in the form of roller coasters, bungee jumping and our all-time favorite: horror movies.I love horror movies. I just adore them, and I am very much not alone in that. Unlike superheroes or musicals or westerns, the business of horror is perennial; it will never go away. Audiences show up for horror year-round, decade after decade. There are whole streaming services dedicated to horror, and they do well. A single genre, go figure.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      LACMA Gala Photos: Charli XCX, Blake Lively and More Celebrities Turn Out

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      Blake Lively, Kaia Gerber and Kim Kardashian took pictures under the lights, posing against a backdrop of more than 200 restored street lamps from “Urban Light,” an installation by the artist Chris Burden that served as a stand-in for a red carpet.It was the 13th annual Art+Film gala, held Saturday night, which raised more than $6.4 million for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the largest art museum in the Western United States.On one side, a sage green carpet contrasted with striking red and glass galleries designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano. On the other, there was a concrete wall of the much-anticipated new LACMA building by the architect Peter Zumthor.And the guest list for the gala, sponsored by Gucci, felt as eclectic as the museum it benefited, as Hollywood fixtures rubbed shoulders with luminaries from the art world, who gathered to honor the filmmaker Baz Luhrmann and the artist Simone Leigh. (LACMA is currently co-presenting an exhibit of Ms. Leigh’s work with the California African American Museum.)This starry mix of creative worlds aligns with the museum director Michael Govan’s vision for LACMA. “The idea was to design it as a place of inspiration for creative people,” Mr. Govan said.The filmmaker Baz Luhrmann.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      From Salzburg to Paris, Dancing Bach’s St. John Passion

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      From Salzburg to Dijon to Paris, a German choreographer adds striking dance to the sacred oratorio.The first thing we hear in Sasha Waltz’s production of the “St. John Passion” (“Johannes-Passion”) is not the mournful opening notes of the sacred oratorio, written by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1724, but rather the whir of sewing machines.Eleven dancers bend over a long table as they mechanically stitch together modest frocks. The chorus enters, with lacerating cries of “Herr, unser Herrscher” (“Lord, our Sovereign”), while the dancers slowly carry the billowy white garments that they have just made downstage, their naked bodies bathed in a golden glow. In a recent phone interview, Waltz referred to these frocks as “the shift of life, the cloth that represents, in a way, your own life, from birth to death.”Over the next two hours, the dancers repeatedly don these white gowns, slip into other, colorful garments, or perform in the nude as they bring Bach’s magisterial music to life, their movements enhanced by shimmering nocturnal lighting. For the most part, the set remains bare throughout the performance; the few props include wooden poles, blocks and planks, rope and mirrors.After springtime performances at the Salzburg Easter Festival in Austria and the Opéra de Dijon in France, the production is to arrive at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in early November. Waltz, 61, is perhaps Germany’s best-known living choreographer, and the latest director of many who have been drawn to Bach’s two surviving passions — grand musical settings of the crucifixion of Jesus.“I think it’s very, very theatrical,” Waltz said of the “St. John Passion.” “It’s maybe the oratorio where Bach comes the closest to opera, I would say. And I love the rhythmicality of the turba choirs,” she added, referring to the highly charged crowd scenes.She was speaking days after receiving this year’s German Dance Award. The jury statement praised her “artistically unique and disciplinary-bursting oeuvre,” which has ranged from works staged in museums to operas, such as Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Local’s Guide to Chiang Rai, Thailand

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      Four insiders on where to stay, eat “micro-seasonal” dishes and shop for handmade pottery and textiles.T’s monthly travel series, Flocking To, highlights places you might already have on your wish list, sharing tips from frequent visitors and locals alike. Sign up here to find us in your inbox once a month, along with our weekly roundup of cultural recommendations, monthly beauty guides and the latest stories from our print issues. Have a question? You can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com.Travelers to the northern provinces of Thailand have long been drawn by two things — elephant camps and campy temples. The most famous examples of each are within or near the 13th-century city of Chiang Rai, where the Wat Rong Khun, or White Temple, stands as an artist’s parable of the world’s ills, as depicted in the form of pop culture villains and other icons of kitsch. (If crossing a sea of grasping arms at the entrance doesn’t terrify you, beware the Freddy Krueger-themed hanging planters.) Chiang Rai is also where the Emerald Buddha, a national treasure now housed in Bangkok’s Grand Palace, was reportedly discovered in 1434. According to legend, a bolt of lightning cracked the stupa in which it had been hidden years prior.Chiang Rai — the city shares its name with the surrounding province — has gained a reputation as something of a tourist trap, thanks to the tour buses that ferry visitors from the White Temple to the equally gaudy Blue Temple and then to the very bleak Black House (which the artist Thawan Duchanee, who died in 2014, decorated with elephant skulls and antlers and a table runner made of snakeskin). But the city, having played second fiddle to the luxe-boho paradise of Chiang Mai ever since King Mang Rai moved the capital of the Lanna Kingdom — which ruled over most of what is now northern Thailand — to the “new city” in 1296, has more recently emerged as an unhurried haven for serious artists and other creative professionals seeking to escape the heat and sprawl of Bangkok.The third edition of Thailand’s roaming Biennale, which brought dozens of international and Thai artists to Chiang Rai this past winter and spring, shed light on an often-overlooked aspect of the city — its long history as a cultural crossroads. Owing both to its proximity to Laos and Myanmar and, to some degree, the Golden Triangle’s uncomfortable past as a center of the global drug trade, Chiang Rai has been the site of intermingling cultures for centuries.“The constant migration of people of different races and religions make this an interesting place both geographically and culturally,” says the Chiang Rai-born artist and gallerist Angkrit Ajchariyasophon. In 2023, Chiang Rai was also recognized by UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network for its sustainable architecture design and landscapes. “My house is near the city’s oldest Christian church, close to an Islamic mosque and a Buddhist temple off the same road,” says Ajchariyasophon. “This is where I grew up and learned about cultural diversity, which I find wonderful.”Today, multigenerational family-run restaurants featuring traditional Thai, Chinese and Myanmarese specialties likewise share a slow-movement sensibility with hipster cafes that serve coffee from beans grown on local farms, and stylish home stays that incorporate teak wood scavenged from nearby forests. Here, Ajchariyasophon and other Chiang Rai enthusiasts offer their recommendations on where to stay, eat, shop and sightsee in and around the city.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More