Cultura

Since 2001, when the UK Labour government decided to establish free universal entry to access the fabulous collections of its national museums (from the National Gallery to the Tate, the Victoria & Albert, or the British Museum), the number of visits increased exponentially in the following decade, reaching increases of more than 250%. For a quarter of a century, this measure has not only been envied by audiences across Europe but the mere possibility of charging an entrance fee has been unimaginable for the British. Until now. The economic difficulties faced by many of these museums have led some to dare to touch what was considered untouchable, and the option of easing their battered finances by charging admission has been put on the table. For now, there is talk of a fee for tourists, but some voices call for a return to order. .

My grandparents were people of walking and bus rides. They did not trust traveling underground. The few times I traveled with them on the subway, they appeared tense: a fall, a shove, a robbery. In a way, wherever the sun did not shine was always territory for the unexpected, the dangerous, and the hidden. Insects lived underground. Worms, the dead, ownerless treasures, evidence of unsolved crimes. Also purely practical aspects like the fact that it was not safe. The ceiling could collapse. What happens if you get trapped in a tunnel, if the train doors close before you. And not to mention the stifling heat or the excessive gathering of unknown people, their smells.

Pepe Habichuela (José Antonio Carmona Carmona) passed away this Tuesday at the age of 82 in Madrid, according to El País, after suffering from an illness that kept him away from the stages in 2024.

The French composer Alexandre Desplat (Paris, 1961), an essential figure in film music and winner of two Oscars for The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Shape of Water, last night put the finishing touch on the 16th edition of the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest, the most attended in the history of the festival, with 53,500 spectators. The musician received from Queen Letizia, who presided over the ceremony, the Masters of Cinema award, with which the festival recognizes the career of great names in the seventh art, during a gala marked by the humid heat of the Mallorcan night in the Renaissance courtyard of La Misericòrdia. Hours earlier, Desplat gave a masterclass in which he showed his creative process based on his collaborations with filmmakers such as Wes Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, and Jacques Audiard.

“Habitar la belleza” is the proposal that in a turbulent and contradictory world the artistic director of Torroella, Montse Faura, makes to us for this edition of the Festival. Nothing less… And she opens the doors to it with a central program of 15 important concerts, some due to the quality of the work of our performers, like this inaugural Beethoven by the OBC and Josep Colom that we have just enjoyed. In it, the musicality and expressive strength of the Catalan pianist was well understood by the OBC and its conductor, the young Belarusian Vitali Alekseenok, current principal of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and Duisburg, who looks very promising in terms of understanding the language and clear gesturality.

And finally the night arrived. After the controversy over reposting a publication that offended Argentinians in the midst of World Cup fever, after the apologies that felt insufficient (“My bad,” she posted), Rosalía performed before the Buenos Aires audience at the Movistar Arena. And if there were ticket returns, it was not noticeable. The stadium looked full.

There was a time when eating some meatballs did not make you want to buy a Billy bookshelf. Thirty years, in fact. It was on May 6, 1996, when the Ikea mothership landed among us and the extraordinary shockwave did not take long to arrive. It was easy, clean, young, and cheap. And there were (in theory) many possibilities. Some people went, in those early days, to Ikea to get ideas. They entered the stores and left without buying anything, with their eyes and heads full of ideas. That leaving without buying didn’t last long. One fact. 6% of Catalans born in these three decades were conceived in Ikea beds. If that impresses you, and returning to the topic of the meatballs from the Swedish restaurant inside the facilities, you should also know that 8.7 million meatballs have been served and eaten, so that if you stacked one meatball on top of another (and on top of the other, the one) we could build a tower 60 kilometers high.

It increasingly seems evident that we have wasted time and energy asking the wrong question. Rather than questioning when Artificial Intelligence will surpass human knowledge, it seems more appropriate to place the question on the human part of…

Considered in the past one of the gods of hip hop and music in general, probably no one like Kanye West has done so much to undermine his prestige and personal credit as himself, even accused of apologism for Nazism, a baggage from which he now seems determined to detach with musical atonements like the one performed this Thursday in Madrid.

Everyone thought that this was just another room in an ancient Roman villa built in Fuente Álamo (Puente Genil, Córdoba). Some speculated that the room could even be a mithraeum, a temple dedicated to the Persian-origin god Mithras and built to imitate a cave. But the space was actually the oldest library on the Iberian Peninsula.