CULTURE: 2026-05-27

by | May 27, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments

Culture Brief 2026-05-27

Ideas in Circulation

The AI avatar problem: when estates commodify the dead

A new front in the debate over posthumous image rights has opened, with the announcement that Ozzy Osbourne — dead a year — will be recreated as a life-sized AI-powered avatar for licensing and performance, prompting immediate fan backlash and a defensive family response that it will be “tasteful.”

The Osbourne case is not isolated — it lands in the same week that Cannes programmers are visibly wrestling with AI’s encroachment on filmmaking, and that publishers are being caught quietly retrofitting decades-old novels with TikTok references to appeal to younger readers. Taken together, these are versions of the same pressure: intellectual and cultural property being reshaped by commercial algorithms and estate logic, with the original artifact quietly hollowed out. The next 12 months will force clearer legal and ethical frameworks, or the precedents set now will be treated as permission.

Cannes 2026 as a muted reckoning for world cinema

This year’s festival closed with Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner Fjord — a multilingual drama on the fault line between religious conservatism and liberalism — while critics filed dispatches describing the overall program as comparatively thin, punctuated by genuine surprises from James Gray, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and the Esiri brothers’ Nigerian-set Virginia Woolf adaptation.

The Mungiu win is the most legible signal: after years of festival programming that often rewarded formal experimentation, the jury chose a film directly engaged with Europe’s culture-war fault lines. The Esiri adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway transposed to Nigeria is the more interesting provocation — an argument that the canonical modernist interior belongs to no single geography, made by filmmakers working from Lagos rather than London. Both choices point toward a festival repositioning itself around urgent political and postcolonial questions, even in a year when the films themselves fell short of the ambition.

Universities as broken systems, not broken policies

Stefan Collini’s LRB essay on British higher education argues that the student loan debate is a distraction from a deeper structural transformation — that marketization has fundamentally altered what universities are for, not merely how they’re funded.

Collini’s piece — substantive enough to read on its own — argues that political discussion of universities remains “at an almost wilfully superficial level,” treating the loan system’s fairness to individual students while ignoring how the underlying premises have reshaped institutional culture, research priorities, and the meaning of academic life. Runciman’s adjacent essay on scoring systems and how they get captured by the values they’re meant to measure provides an unwitting theoretical frame: once universities are scored as businesses, they become businesses. This is a live debate with direct parallels to American higher education and to any institution where metrics have displaced mission.

Russian ideology as accretion, not doctrine

Greg Afinogenov’s LRB essay argues that contemporary Russian ideology has no single creed — no manifesto — but has formed through layered, successive ideological conflicts: from Putin-era statist ordoliberalism, through conservative geopolitics, to the current eschatological militarism.

This framing matters because it changes how the conflict in Ukraine gets analyzed. If Russian ideology is dialectical rather than fixed, then looking for a coherent “Putin doctrine” to negotiate with or defeat is a category error. What’s actually in play is a shifting accumulation of grievances, mythologies, and military theology — harder to address because there is no single argument to refute. This is among the more useful frames for understanding why Western policy responses keep failing to find the correct register.

Palestinian poetry as international cultural form

Two new poetry collections — written under bombardment, typed on phones, circulating through diaspora networks — are drawing sustained attention as documents of both literary and historical witness, prompting questions about what literature can do that journalism cannot.

The Guardian piece notes that poetry is “a line of defence amid the rubble” — not metaphorically but functionally, as a form of transmission that travels through blockaded networks in ways that longer prose cannot. Graham’s Killing Spree, reviewed separately, arrives as American literary poetry is independently grappling with its own vocabulary for catastrophe. The convergence suggests that poetry — long declared marginal — is once again being asked to carry weight that other forms have declined.

Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

Fjord — Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner: a multilingual drama about religious conservatism and social liberalism, chosen by a jury that clearly wanted to say something about Europe’s present.

Clarissa — The Esiri brothers’ Nigerian-set adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway, which “wowed” Cannes and poses the sharpest question about literary inheritance currently running through international cinema.

I Love Boosters — Boots Riley’s Cannes-screened working-class comedy, reviewed seriously by multiple outlets as a polychromatic argument about capitalism and redistribution, not merely a genre exercise.

Paul McCartney: The Boys of Dungeon Lane — Alexis Petridis reviews the new album at 83, finding in it genuine melodic craft and purposefulness rather than legacy-management — worth attention as a question about what late-career artistic seriousness actually looks like.

Hal Foster: At MoMA — Foster’s LRB piece on the Duchamp retrospective argues that a large dose of the real thing is the best cure for Duchamp fatigue, and uses the show to examine why the readymade still generates such unresolvable critical energy fifty years after Lippard declared the conversation exhausted.

Essays Worth the Read

Stefan Collini: Squadrons of Pigs

Collini argues that Britain’s university crisis is systemic and conceptual — that the loan-system debate, by framing everything in terms of individual fairness to students, forecloses the harder question of what universities are actually for and what decades of marketization have done to them at the level of purpose and culture. The essay is a model of refusing to accept the terms in which a problem is publicly framed. American readers will find every beat of the argument familiar.

Building an AI Data Center in Pine Island, Minnesota

Thomas John Weber uses the arrival of a tech company in a small Minnesota town — notable primarily for inventing waterskiing and producing the Midwest Pipe Bomber — to examine what AI infrastructure does to place, to the pastoral imagination, and to James Wright’s famous poem about that exact field. The essay earns its literary scaffolding by actually using it: this is about what it means when the ground under a lyric gets data-centered.

Rahmane Idrissa: AK-47 and Guitar

Idrissa frames the Sahara as a dumping ground for distant powers’ unwanted problems — not a region with its own dynamics but a geography of external abandonment — and uses that frame to explain the interlocking crises of jihadism, military coups, and cultural survival across the Sahel. The music-and-weapons pairing in the title is not decorative: Tuareg guitar culture and armed insurgency have grown from the same political soil.

One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

Barthelme, the Houstonian

Susan Choi’s essay for the Paris Review on Donald Barthelme is nominally a piece about the writer’s Houston years, but it is actually about what it means to discover a writer who teaches you what writing can be — and specifically what Barthelme’s refusal of conventional narrative taught a generation about the comedy of insufficient language. Choi is sharp on why Barthelme still resists assimilation into either the postmodern canon or the American short-story tradition, and why the Houston context (overlooked, provincial, hot) matters for understanding the absurdism that made him. If you haven’t read Barthelme, this will send you there; if you have, it will reorganize what you thought you knew.