The Things We Learned From Telling Tita Jokes - Sesaya Arts Magazine

Updated: Oct 20, 2026 10:50am UTCGod of War's Kratos almost went by a different name, but developers at Santa Monica Studio made too many Domino's pizza jokes. David Jaffe, the director of the original God of War trilogy, recently put out a video explaining the deep dish issue. Originally, Kratos was called “Dominus,” which Jaffe liked because it made him sound dominant and strong. Unfortunately, it also made him sound like a chain of pizza restaurants. “The people on the team started making Domino’s Pizza jokes,” Jaffe said. “Every single time someone said Dominus, someone inevitably would yell out, ‘30 minutes or free,’ or, ‘Get the door, it’s Dominus.’“After about the 50th time, the writing was on the wall. Dominus was dead and we needed a new name for our hero.” Someone at the studio printed out a big list of Ancient Greek baby names and Jaffe went through with a yellow highlighter marking the best ones. “The names that I highlighted were not great,” he said, pointing at Julius, Parthenius, and Maksym as examples. “Nothing felt just right. Eventually, our marketing lead, Susan Panico, was the one who came up with the name Kratos.

Earlier this month, the real estate company 320 E 82nd Owner, LLC filed a petition seeking to compel socialite art collector Libbie Mugrabi and the auction house Phillips to turn over an untitled 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting in the latter’s possession in order to satisfy a $2.3 million judgment. New York County Supreme Court judge Linda M. Capitti pushed the petition forward last week, approving an order on October 14 preventing the sale or transfer of the Basquiat and compelling Mugrabi and Phillips to appear in court on November 17 to show cause for why the Basquiat—as well as Mugrabi’s 100 percent membership interest in Moo Moo Enterprises, Inc., which holds the work—should not be turned over to satisfy the debt. Mugrabi has yet to respond to the petition or the judge’s order.

When a major museum receives apainting on loan from a private owner, the first step is documentation: photography, examination, report-writing. But it’s surprisingly rare for collectors to do the same with their new acquisitions. Skeptics might dismiss the effort and expense of institutional loan protocols as a bureaucratic performance, done more to appease the insurance company and the lender than to benefit the art. Paintings aren’t plants, after all—why behave as if they’ll suddenly wilt? But (for better or worse) paintings have many more moving parts than the casual observer might suspect, and it’s easy to underestimate their capacity for change. What is paint, anyway? What might look like a simple dab of dark red can actually comprise, on the molecular level, thousands of particles of metals and stones, blended with extracts from plants, insects, and animals, all suspended together in the delicate equilibrium of the paint film. It’s actually hard to say whether a painting counts as flora, fauna, or mineral. If an artist mounted vines and beetles and chunks of iron to a wall, this would be considered a mixed-media sculpture.

Kiran Leonard presses the tips of his fingers together and looks at me solemnly across the table. “I don’t know if I’m doing a very good job,” he says, “But I’m trying really, really hard not to swear.”A decade ago, he explains, he was interviewed by the Guardian, got too drunk, and “swore all the way through the interview”. When the piece came out, his grandfather was thrilled. “But he couldn’t show any of his friends because I just sounded really aggressive,” he tells me sheepishly. It’s true that, the last time Leonard had a profile in this paper, he sounded a lot like a twentysomething trying hard to shed the preciousness of his former status as a teenage wunderkind. Hailed as a prodigy at age 16, upon the release of baroque, bonkers 2012 debut Bowler Hat Soup, a lot of Leonard’s early press plays up his age in a way that now reads as embarrassingly trite. “I think, unconsciously, I was probably quite defensive about how I was written about,” he says.