The Iconic 'Rocky' Statue at the Philadelphia Art Museum Steps Is Still Stirring Up Strong Feelings - Smithsonian Magazine

When Dan had had enough of his television, he threw a rock straight through the screen. The offence? His smart TV was downloading its third update in three days. “It drove me crazy with what seemed like daily software updates that never fixed anything and ‘features’ that never seemed to work,” says the 71-year-old from Illinois. “And of course, constantly trying to push me to subscribe to paid-for services when all I wanted to do was watch over-the-air TV, play a DVD or stream something from my computer.”Some may accuse Dan of being a luddite, but his master’s degree in computer science and decades of experience in telecommunications would suggest otherwise. “The tech is not intimidating,” he explains, “just increasingly enshittified.”The first smart TVs entered the market in the late 2000s, when companies introduced operating systems, media players and apps to screens that were becoming wider and thinner. In recent years, the luxury status of smart TVs has waned and increasingly affordable options are widely available. Tom Parsons, TV and audiovisual editor at the electronics magazine What Hi-Fi?, explains that these cheaper models can struggle under more advanced features.

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. The Villa Domínguez Jewish Museum in Argentina is keeping its doors open amid clashes with the local government.

When the final episode of Ghosts was aired in December 2023, the sitcom felt as if it had reached a definitive conclusion. The show’s central relationships, between Charlotte Ritchie’s Alison and the ghosts who haunt her tumbledown inherited manor house, were neatly tied up, as they encouraged her to sell the place to a hotel developer. It was a tearjerker of an episode for the millions of people who watched it, as well as for the cast and crew behind the scenes. “We had stopped the series with genuinely no intention of coming back,” explains the show’s co-creator Mathew Baynton, who also stars as the callow romantic poet Thomas. “We were all in tears on the last day of filming,” he says, now perched on the uncomfortable end of a chaise lounge in a London hotel suite. “I was so upset that it finished,” adds Lolly Adefope, who plays the excitable Kitty, from the better structured end of the chaise. “It was like being at a party and you guys were leaving.”“It was a clear ending, and the guys felt like they had fully explored all of the characters,” says director Simon Hynd, “but I did notice a look of regret in some of their eyes.”All of which is to say that Ghosts is now back.

If I’d ever wanted children, the films showing at the 59th edition of the International Fantastic film festival of Catalonia in the coastal town of Sitges, south of Barcelona, would have soon set me straight. This year’s recurring themes were explosive parturition, chewed-up nipples and the fruit of the womb turning out to be at best sociopathic, at worst inhuman. The theme was celebrated in an evil-kiddy exhibition at the Miramar Cultural Centre, marking the 50th anniversary of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s “fantaterror” classic Who Can Kill a Child?, some of which was filmed in Sitges itself. The expo traced the subgenre from 1956’s The Bad Seed, via Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, to this year’s Nightborn, in which poor Rupert Grint, as the hapless husband, is no match for the developing folk-horror bond between his depressed wife, their newborn “child”, and the spooky forest surrounding their house. Finnish director Hanna Bergholm, in her introduction, confessed it was inspired by her experiences of motherhood. Only up to a point, one hopes.

A Swedish auction house will sell an abstract painting by Hilma af Klint, an artist whose work almost never comes to market. The painting, titled Ser III No. 5 (1920), will be sold by the Stockholm-based Bukowskis house during a November 19 sale of modern art and design objects. It has been given an estimate of $600,000–$800,000, and if it reaches even its low estimate, the work will shatter af Klint’s prior auction record.