culture

Over the years, pop culture has been a very important part of communication. It was present in jokes, metaphors, and advertisements. In a way, it created the language with which we communicated. Both the canon and current fashions played an important role here.

In recent months, the University of Theater and Film Arts in Budapest (SZFE) became the new target of the Hungarian government’s culture war. The experiences of the institution’s response may change the nature of future demonstrations.

No, Rick and Morty is not liberal. Neither is it anything else. But it opens interdimensional portals in the static minds, and without us realizing it cajoles us into critical introspection. The show is great because it anticipates expectations, and chucks them in a bin, lights it on fire, and moves on.

Coronavirus has become water for the mill of all those who would like a strong central, authoritarian-like government. On the Polish radio, I have already heard the cries of admiration for the Chinese system, which apparently would be more effective than the European Union is.

Take James Bond for instance. Ever since the series’ soft reboot in 2006 with Casino Royale, there is not a single enemy country in the movies, despite the fact that Russia upped its game in manipulating the internal politics of Western countries, and China sugarcoating its increasingly Orwellian dystopia.

There are clear reasons why Silicon Valley or Shenzhen are synonymous with high technologies - they are the place where entrepreneurs and businesses in this field have created their ecosystem, and accordingly attract those who want to break into the industry.

The new director of the National Museum of Warsaw announced in April that he intends to remove the 1973 video “Consumer Art” by artist Natalia LL, which depicts a naked woman eating a banana in a suggestive manner. This raised concerns that the museum was censoring its content.

The fourth edition of Freedom Games was held on October 19-21, 2017, in Łódź (Poland). The unique interdisciplinary forum, the aim of which is to offer a creative space for individuals from the sectors of culture, business and public affairs, among others, to discuss the key challenges the Western societies must face in the 21st century.

Putin’s Russia is the first country that has deliberately made the carnival a cornerstone of its domestic and foreign policies – in fact, of its entire post-Soviet political architecture. The first country to have established, one decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a full-fledged TV-run postmodern dictatorship – a so-called “managed democracy”.

Freedom Games 2015 took place in Lodz on October 15-17. For the two and a half day exhibiting 43 different events, over one hundred panelists and active participants together with almost half a thousand attendees gathered in the industrial space of the former power plant turned into an amazing EC1 – City of Culture building complex to discuss “How to Save Democracy?”.