The debate over separating art from the artist has persisted for centuries, gaining even greater significance in today’s social and cultural climate of cancellation. No single artist, or personality, has put this argument to the test more than Ye, formally known as Kanye West. His career and life are interlocked in a crazy duet and has become increasingly unstable as each chapter of his life progresses. Due to this, many current and long-time fans defensively argue that we must separate Ye from his art to preserve his incredible work. I say, no. Ye’s life is his art and to try to separate the two is to strip his art of all meaning, no matter how problematic his behavior is.

GREATNESS

the art of greatness in art is not what you think

By Devon Eckert

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is often hailed as the greatest painting in the world, attracting 20,000 eager visitors every day. But if we look at the painting itself, it’s hard to argue that it’s objectively the greatest artwork ever created. In fact, the Mona Lisa is a technically proficient portrait, but not without its limitations. It’s not particularly large and quite pedestrian in its use of color, composition, and subject matter. Nothing sets it apart from countless other Renaissance works. So why has it become the most famous painting in the world?

SKIN STORIES
a brief history of tattoos in art and life

By Lily Marylander

The Illustrated Man (1969)

In today’s day and age, I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have a tattoo. They are symbols of creativity, self-expression, commitment to one’s identity, and strength, and now of course, there is a certain “cool” factor. They have come a long way from being ceremonial for ancient societies to sailors marking their life at sea, to symbolizing gang involvement, to declaring a person punk and alternative, and finally today to being mostly ornamental and even achieving the status of fine art with gallery and museum shows. In 1969 The Illustrated Man came out in theaters and Rod Steiger was covered head to toe with a full bodysuit of tattoos. The public was shocked and intrigued and the film and imagery were marked as sci-fi, horror, and about as far from normal as you could get. Today you can see people with full bodysuits buying heirloom tomatoes at Safeway. Why have tattoos been so historically controversial? When did they make the shift into the popular public sphere? And why is it now considered normal and extremely accessible for anyone to sport a small infinity sign on the wrist to a full bodysuit? These questions and their answers intrigue me, so let us sink the needle in and start sketching out a plausible history.

THE HYBRID LIFE OF THE MEXICAN SOUL

or that's a lot of culture for one mind

By Renata Blanco

Sometimes I feel as if I only have fragments of Mexico in my soul, bits and pieces of ideas, beliefs, visions all playing around in my mind. And then I think, well, that’s what it means to be Mexican. When I was young, as an only child and grandchild, I was extremely spoiled. Every October for my birthday I would ask my grandmother for Pan de Muerto (Day of the Dead bread). I share with many Mexicans, the troubling trait of undoing the line between death and birth. As my grandmother would explain, Pan de Muerto is a piece of culinary magic, a traditional dish born of wildly different cultures, a combination of ingredients from everywhere that somehow becomes in our crazy nation, just bread. I’m not sure whether to honor it or cry.

I VANT TO BE ALONE

or the disappearing woman artist

By Lauren Heine

Converse

To ensure a life of fame, one must do no less than sell one’s soul to the devil. A dangerous deal with never-ending consequences: some immediate and some far into the future. While many celebrities accept their fate, others attempt to negotiate the fine print and squirm out from under the devil’s contract. But ironically enough, the only way out is the way in which they came: a life as a nobody. For many, this is a worthy trade, a life doing what they love in return for little life outside of that. However, the problem is that even the renegotiation of the contract is fraught and difficult to maneuver.

THE AMERICAN DAD WAY

murder, mayhem, and family time on television's best and greatest show ever (without exaggeration)

By Gabrielle Kedziora

What makes something impeccable? Shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park each were wonderful in their own individual ways, but if you’re going to combine innocent childhood cartoon styles with crude toilet humor, questionable sex jokes, and racial insensitivity, you have to do it right! Finally, with American Dad, show runners Seth MacFarlane, Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman do it and truly capture the most enigmatic aspects of our lives. The show follows Stan Smith, a painfully patriotic CIA agent and his family in Langley Falls, Virginia. Standouts in the family are Francine Smith, a ditzy alcoholic housewife, Haley Smith and Jeff Fisher, a stoner hippie and her stoner hippie husband, both who still live at home (freeloaders). The younger son Steve Smith, a horny prepubescent nerd, who sings like a sweet angel. And of course, the lovable “creatures” of the house, Roger a crossdressing alien hiding from the CIA and Klaus a goldfish with the brain of an East German Olympic ski jumper.

THE LEONARD COHEN-ANTHONY BOURDAIN TWIN STORY

two icons find their identity in the same way

By Sara Cruz

I was walking along listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Is This What You Wanted” and I saw Anthony Bourdain’s face. As Cohen sang, “Is this what you wanted? / To live in a house that is haunted by the ghost of you and me?” there he was, not actually of course, but in my mind. Yes, his face, was in my mind. I had recently rewatched Bourdain’s hit television series No Reservations but still, why was I imagining Bourdain singing the whole of Cohen’s album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, or for that matter Cohen trying some exotic food on the other side of the world. The answer should have come sooner, but I was slowly figuring out, at first unconsciously, and then, as an unmistakable fact, that Cohen and Bourdain are actually and symbolically cultural twins. What a late afternoon epiphany, I had to sit down and catch my breath.

A BAND SO FICTIONAL IT'S REAL

or Damon Albarn's strange experiment in pop

By Morty Tillman

The Gorillaz are a collaborative virtual band founded by Damon Albarn and Jaime Hewlette. But what’s fascinating about them is that they created four fictional characters to represent the band, each with elaborate backstories. We might say the split in the band is between the real-life creators and the fictional band that they themselves have created. And all that might seem a rather simple joke on celebrity, or pop music, or fandom, but the tensions and strange ideas that come from it are far from simple and far from being easy to describe.

GAMERGATE 2.0 AND MORE

one gamer's dissection of a problem

By Iris Chang

Recently, a game called Concord has become a hot topic. As a team-based, first-person shooter developed by Sony over eight years and with a budget of over a hundred of million, it was officially released on the PS5 and Steam platforms on August 23, 2024. To say that the release was a disaster is an understatement. The servers were shut down in under 12 days after it launched with the company handing out hundreds of thousands of refunds. What happened? In the current gaming market, keywords like political correctness, DEI principles, GamerGate 2.0, and “woke” have already sparked widespread discussion. Concord, along with its very short lifespan, has become the focal point of this debate. In order to understand why Concord sparked so much opposition, we must first look at what happened during GamerGate 1.0.

WHAT, WHY, WHO IS COSPLAY

or a few facts about a new form of identity

By Tony Liu

On June 1st, 2024. Under the blazing sun with temperatures reaching 35°C (95 Fahrenheit), I arrived at a slightly remote area in Beijing. As soon as I stepped out of the taxi, I was hit by a wave of heat. Carrying my heavy camera bag, I felt a bit out of place, dressed like an ordinary man amid a sea of red hair, blue hair, purple hair, wigs, wings, masks, all of which must have weighed several pounds. My friend had spent several hundred yuan (close to 100 dollars) to custom-order her wig, and just watching her put it on made me sweat. Where was I?

TIME UNFOLDING

or dance with art and light

By Eason Jiang

Once upon a time. It’s a phrase that we hear our whole lives. It is the witness and recorder of time, the moment we go from listeners to speakers; it is the trigger of the time machine to activate our brains, bringing us back to the unknown period when the story begins. The “time” comes to our ears, like a rewinding tape, like a rolling vinyl record. We hear it, just like the question, can a fish see the water that surrounds it? To us who are wrapped in time, is this concept visible or touchable? Fortunately, we are not fish. We, to some extent, are good at creating objects to which time can attach itself.

LARS VON TRIER BUILDS A FILM THAT DEFIES OUR WORLD

the terror inside The House that Jack Built

By Bert Wang

Some weeks ago on a Saturday night, just after finishing my nighttime routine, I set up my video projector, lay in bed, and somehow knew I was ready to rewatch The House That Jack Built, Lars von Trier’s journey into the serial killer genre. Everything was perfect and then the fire alarm started to ring. As my roommates and I were evacuating the building, we decided to kill time at Timkin Hall and watch The House that Jack Built anyway. After midnight, some film major friends of mine decided to join along as well. This was the first time that I had watched von Trier with a crowd and I began to worry about their reactions. It made me quite nervous, if sweating is a sign of nervousness.

SOCIAL MEDIA'S FUTURE IS?

the human touch will save us on-line

By Sofia Porzio

I was 17 years old when a musician’s agent asked me to make a video on “TikTok”, then a new social media app, to lip sync a song of an artist they were managing. Little did I know that that request would turn into a full-time TikTok career. I have gone from 0 followers to approximately 4.5 million in 2024, becoming a creator who was once just a follower. Whenever I see "think pieces" about social media (generally old media critiques about how harmful it is), they usually come from people outside the creator marketplace—followers of the experience rather than creators or active contributors to it. Due to social media's ever-evolving nature, those critiques tend to miss the medium's complexities and are bad predictors of where social media will take us.

SCP FOUNDATION

the strange site of society, language games, and rules

By Pierce Parker

Figure this Out

What are the rules you play by in your life? Of course, you have to eat, drink, and sleep. Those rules are simple. If you don’t play by them, then you won’t last long. Nearly all of us also play by society’s rules. We dress ourselves, obey traffic laws, get a job to make money, and buy things. After that we have some choices. When you log into your social media of choice to consume and post, you play by a similar, but different set of rules (X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.). When you read a post, you understand what's happening because of the rules. You know the top left shows who posted it, you know underneath is the main image or video, you know underneath that are the creators’ description or thoughts on what they posted, and finally you know under that are comments from other users. These are rules that you follow in order to play in an online game or society.

The Age of Eco Horror

the genre that hasn't quite caught on

By Olivia Meurk

The disaster is here

The environment is changing around us. Everytime I turn on the news it feels like I am just scrolling through a sick apocalyptic catalog of disasters. From local fires to global floods, there is fear and hopelessness and death. And really, I don’t even need to watch the news; my teachers are melancholic and cathartic, they bemoan what the young will have to figure out while prattling on about how it all used to be. My mom apologizes to me for the world that her generation has left to mine. I mean, haven’t you heard? We’re boiling now.

THE FOUR TRUE RULES OF THE REAL-LIFE TERRORIST FILM

a lesson in genre

By Jenny Chen

They're all scary

There’s a whole range of true-life terrorist attack films. Here’s a list: Argo (2012), Hotel Mumbai (2018), Hotel Rwanda (2004), Patriots' Day (2016), World Trade Center (2006), The 15:17 to Paris (2018) and Flight 93 (2006). What’s fascinating about this genre is how the rules of the genre are so stable and are repeated over and over again throughout each film. It doesn’t matter if the attack is in France, India, or the United States; wherever, the same thing happens again and again, which is odd because we tend to think of terrorist attack films as being unique. But they aren’t, they’re as clichéd as love stories. They follow a set of rules that filmmakers repeat over and over again. It’s only because terrorist attack films represent something that feels unique and awful that we think what we’re watching a film that is unique and awful. But that’s not true: these films might be more rigid than love stories, and I'm going to show you how they are.

THE HAUNTING OF OUR IMAGINATIONS

the sudden appearance of liminal space

By Rubi Sanmiguel

What's wrong?

The definition of a Liminal Space is not a concrete one, but it builds off of the literal origin of the word liminal: the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage. When we apply the idea of a middle stage to a location, we get places like hallways, airports, and schools, in-between places that we pass through as we travel from place to place. The same concept can also be applied to the self and our experiences of passing through time, such as adolescence, where we’re uncomfortably between childhood and adulthood. We can assign other specific examples of these places such as homes, stores, malls, playgrounds, rural roads, gas stations, hospitals, and other places destinations where we spend small amounts of time. These places are not scary or eerie. They’re normally bustling with customers and employees, other children, people living their day-to-day lives, and it is this day-to-day context which makes them comforting.

Cho Giseok wants to grow up to be an Art Director

The Nostalgia dreams of a great artist

By William Choi

“When I was young, I wanted to be an art director.” It’s a funny statement and even funnier when you think that it comes from South Korean avant-garde photographer, Cho Giseok. I mean what kid dreams of becoming an art director? Born in 1992, he studied Graphic design at Kookmin University; however, he found the practice unsatisfying and, dropped out at the age of 20 to try to become an art director. As he learned more about the field, he started to build skills in many different fields such as set design and photography. “I wanted to create my own images, and I wanted to work through all the processes.”

WHAT A CHARACTER

the Joker is becoming the man

By Jason Chou

It's lonely being the one

The Joker, Batman's iconic nemesis, has transcended the realms of cheap 1940s comic books to become a magnetic figure in contemporary pop culture. He appeared in the first Batman comic book (1946) and was immediately popular, the perfect foil to the strait-laced and bat-tortured hero. Throughout the long history of comic books, it is always the Joker issues that sell the most and command the most money on the collectibles market. Still, that’s just a small corner of the culture industry and, for many years, one that no one took seriously.

FREEDOM

my life in the Red Bull Rampage

By Ben Curtis

Ben (Me!) Hitting A-Line//Whistler, BC

On my bike is where I feel alive. I relish it. I crave it. I obsess about it. Once that front wheel leaves the ground and the adrenaline kicks in, it's all in the balancing, just like life itself. Feeling the pull of gravity, going beyond it, and getting that jolt of nervous energy, I panic and feather the brakes. No wheelie lasts forever, though, it sure feels like it could or at least that you wish it could. Some of us have a compulsion to ride, to embrace the air, explore the unknown, and take the trail that no one else has taken. That’s just the way it goes, like some mutant gene that skips a generation. I vividly remember the first extreme mountain biking film I watched, and boy, was 9-year-old me gripped. I would try to emulate the riders, be the coolest kid, skid madly and jump curbs. I wasn't that good, but I was having fun. What's important is that these films fueled my imagination. I was captivated, but I had no idea why.

A TAXI DRIVER BECOMES A COUNTRY

the Gwangju Uprising as political art

By Uijin Sohn

The uprising

The Gwangju Democracy Movement, also known as the Gwangju Uprising, began as a peaceful protest led by students and citizens calling for democratic reform and an end to military dictatorship, but the protests grew in size and intensity, leading to violent government repression, tragic confrontations and loss of life. The Gwangju Uprising was ultimately instrumental in South Korea's transition to democracy, sparking national outrage and spurring efforts toward greater political freedom and democratic reform. The movement is remembered as a symbol of the struggle for democracy and human rights.

HE SAW IT ALL

the visionary Hideo Kojima

By Riley Kuang

A visionary with glasses

Hideo Kojima once predicted that there would be a huge information system connecting the world in the future, through which people would be connected to each other, but that in the end people with ulterior motives would use it to control access to information. People scoffed at this, until today. Kojima once made a prediction that in the future, wars would become a business, and the system built by wars would only maintain the existence of that system. People scoffed at this, until today. Kojima once predicted a not-too-distant future in which people would huddle in separate worlds and rely solely on couriers to keep them connected. People scoffed at this, until today.

YOU HAVE TO HATE HER

the trickiest misogyny trope on tv

By Maeve Mckinney

Trapped in misogyny

I know that you think you’ve overcome your misogyny, but I’m here to tell you that maybe the old bigotry has a few new tricks, tricks so deep in the culture that you can’t see them and that you can only react to them. Everyone hates when someone gets in the way of what they want and in a number of recent television shows/movies the burden of being the blockade has fallen squarely on the shoulders of female characters. As one redditor put it so eloquently about Skylar White in Breaking Bad, “She's just so perfectly hateable. It's like they spent years developing the most annoying character ever.” It doesn’t matter how big a feminist you are, a woman who gets in the way of the hero is going to inspire hate, your hate, and it all goes out the window when a woman gets in the way of a man’s fun. We literally can’t help ourselves. While the literary trope in itself is not misogynistic, it finds its perfect form in misogyny.

WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

Camus' search for freedom with meaning

By Kelsey Seo

The man himself

I believe that Albert Camus is the key to earning our liberation in today's society. Camus was acutely aware that we’re always in a state of degeneration at the same time that the world, the natural world, moves forward and grows in abundant ways. This gives our existence a whiplash quality: we’re always moving one way and the world is always moving in another. We’re creeping towards death, as the world keeps on bringing forth new life. It’s as if existence itself is suffering from its own meaninglessness. Camus understood this and in his strange, first novel, The Stranger (1942), gives us three deaths to contemplate and each of those deaths are represents a key to understanding how Camus wants us to live.

UNBOXING THE ART OF COLLECTING

is this what we want?

By Carolyn Kim

Do you want this?

Everyone collects something; you know, each to their own and all that stuff. From art, bags, shoes, books, sports to K-pop photocards and NFTs, collections take many forms that reflect people’s diverse interests, passions, and hobbies. Collections create new subcultures in which people find joy and community. Collections serve as a way to connect with others and as your collections grow, they become part of you. It’s a deeply personal art and a rewarding pursuit that brings joy, satisfaction, and a sense of connection.

IS HE THE GOD OF MANGA?

yes, Urasawa Naoki is

By Marshall Hu

Two pictures of God

Many fans and critics consider Osamu Tezuka one of the great figures in the history of manga. Without a doubt, Astro Boy and Black Jack have had a profound impact on manga aesthetics and culture. In order to commemorate Tezuka's outstanding contributions and to encourage subsequent comic talents to take up the mantle of Tezuka’s brilliant innovations and work, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun created the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 1997 to recognize new and inspiring achievements in the field. The joking title for the winner is the “God of Manga.”

THE GREAT APPLE STAIRCASES

and a few others of note

By Xinye Ju

Look at the missing C of craftsmanship

Stairs are often overlooked and underappreciated features of our daily lives. We ascend and descend them routinely, taking their presence for granted. Even when they exude a touch of grandeur, they're often reduced to mere functionality. However, as a designer, I've come to see stairs as more than just utilitarian structures – they are captivating, awe-inspiring creations that play a pivotal role in our lives. They hold secrets to understanding beauty, form, our relationship with the world, and the essence of moving from one place to another. Yet, there's a new breed of stairs that has taken the design world by storm, gracing Apple stores across the globe. These staircases possess a mesmerizing beauty so profound that it transcends visual brilliance to reach out and touch your very soul. Am I going too far here? Maybe, but why not, let’s keep on praising these unsung saints. Apple has reached the pinnacle of staircase design, and, bold as it may sound, I might dare to claim that they are the most extraordinary staircases ever conceived.

THE STATIC BECOMES DYNAMIC

the public art revolution at d'strict

By Evelyn Lee

The team

Imagine you open your window and you see the majestic sight of the entire solar system in front of you. Or, you walk down the street and the building in front of you is turning into water. Or, you’re in Times Square and a flatiron building becomes a waterfall. Moments of pure fantasy like these used to be strictly the province of a childhood imagination. And so, the question is what happens when you bring these types of fantasies to life. Well, D’strict,a South Korean art? advertising? branding? tech? company is giving it a try.

THE HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL MOVIES

Or, your life as the best movie ever

By Vrinda Bindal

Look at those two

It’s New Year’s Eve and you’ve just sung karaoke with someone you’ve just met but it’s love at first sight. You know it, they know it, the guy who set you two up to sing knows it. No, that’s too cheesy, too dreamy. Is it though? High School Musical, released in 2006, was the first of a trilogy of the cheesiest, dreamiest movies you could ever imagine. Based on the lives of six characters in their final two years of high school, the movie starts with Troy and Gabriella at a ski resort on New Year’s Eve, who get invited up to sing. Two weeks later, they find out that they attend the same school. Incredible!

The Revolutionary Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

or the future of art

By Andrew Chang

Beautiful, isn't it?

It has been a recognizable fact that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has become one of the most important milestones in video game history since its release in 2017. This game is the first of its kind to bring high art into a popular video game franchise. To understand this outstanding project from Eiji Aonuma and his team at Nintendo, we need to look back at other video game releases during that time. Major companies were releasing large-scale open-world games that people were getting tired of, and the indie game studio had artistic games that only appealed to a small audience. BOTW slipped into the gap between indie art and popular games, and in doing so, it broke out from each category into what might be the future of art.

THE TRICK OF LUXURY CONSUMPTION

Or, Bang and Olufsen reads the market

By Heather Lee

Oh, so cool

Luxury consumption and Bang and OlufsenThe luxury products market is growing so much that despite the economic recession sales are still strong. However, there are voices of concern that consumption of luxury products encourages overspending. This leads to why people think so negatively about luxury products. Of course, each person has different reasons for consuming them. Some people buy luxury goods because of the value-conscious consumption, the parade of wealth, the demand for bling, and the bandwagon effect. To be wholly honest, I currently own Bang & Olufsen's H95 headphones and I adore them. Traveling to New York in March, I visited the Bang & Olufsen Store for the first time and I was excited.

THE UNLIKELIEST ART TWINS IN THE WORLD

Hipster Director Martin McDonagh and Flannery O'Connor believe in a quite interesting God

By Zonghao Mo

Look at what that movie character is reading

We tend to think in differences, both big, small, and in-between, and this goes for artists, countries, people, everything. And so, we can miss connections that are sometimes staring us right in the face. On the surface, there could be no greater distance than that between Martin McDonagh and Flannery O’Connor. He’s a cosmopolitan Londoner, married to the equally cosmopolitan Phoebe Waller-Bridge and O’Connor was a hyper-religious Southerner from deep rural Georgia. You won’t find these two at the same party, but there are more than a few, fascinating connections between them, and they have to do with how they understand God and Man.

THE GREAT FEMINIST REVENGE FILMS OF 21ST CENTURY KOREA

The wild women of Korean cinema

By Fiona Xu

Served up cold

South Korea is going through a feminist revolution that is as quiet and subversive as it is radical. It’s a difficult cultural shift to actually pin down. Many aspects of Korean society achieve a real equality between men and women, but there are other aspects that are, how shall we put it, much less progressive. This makes for an interesting and volatile situation and what’s fascinating, besides the cultural and sociological ramifications, is how feminism is represented in art, and especially the movies. Almost any contemporary Korean movie you see will have interesting takes on feminism and women, especially young women. We could literally choose from hundreds, but these three are especially relevant: Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005); Cheol-soo Jang’s Bedevilled(2010) and Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Ji-young, born in 1982 (2016).

MISINTERPRETATIONS ABOUND AROUND YU HUA'S THE SEVENTH DAY

Or, what Chinese and American critics get wrong

By Kellie Wu

In comparing the American and Chinese reviews of Yu Hua's The Seventh Day, we can see a number of interesting problems. One, there's something about Yu's novel that has the quality of a strange mirror. It reflects the world back at the reader, but what the reader gets is not a true reflection of the world, but one distorted by ideas of justice and care. It is a powerful literary vision, but one that generates misinterpretations, both in Yu’s home country of China and in America, and those misinterpretations say more about the critics and their countries than about Yu’s brilliant work.

MAGNUM OPUSES COLLIDE

Lawrence Argeant's Venus is more San Francisco than we could ever imagine

By Katherine Cooke

It makes you think...of many things

Part I:

Venus

This morning San Francisco woke again to begin its daily grind, unaffected by its current state of despair. Another day, another dollar; another man dead with a needle in his arm and no one is left to cry. The departed man’s face is frozen, his body motionless, strewn aside, cascading down the cold marble stairs that descend from ‘C’era Una Volta’ piazza, nestled within Trinity Place in San Francisco’s ‘Mid-Market’ sector. The man’s face hangs, stuck in a state of shock. Pallid and blue in complexion, any life left in his face is now long since flush. His mouth gapes open, once gasping for air; but in this moment, no breath fills his lungs, and none comes out. Only a crispfall zephyr sweeps across his sallow face, a reminder of how callous our city has become.

THE ART OF THE MONOGRAPH

Three beautiful pieces

By Jaden Fuhrer

Stunning Juxtopositions

In the world of photography, everybody has a story to tell, whether it is through photojournalism, fine art, or everything in between. One can find series online that people have carefully curated showcasing an artist’s body of work. But where else would one be able to tell their story or speak their truth? Photographic monographs tell stories and portray feelings in carefully curated editions. Any consumer of art should look to monographs for three reasons: curated inspiration, ease of access, and a storytelling experience unlimited by traditional cultural distinctions.

AN ESSAY ON JEFF GOLDBLUM

yes, really

By Eli Cather

He's fly

Since landing his first lead role as Dr. Seth Brundle in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum has been on a steady and escalating path to becoming “Jeff Goldblum”, a man who is more than “Jeff Goldblum” the actor, and the actor “Jeff Goldblum” who is approaching mythic status, or maybe I’m going a bit too far. He has starred in some of the highest grossing films of his era, including Jurassic Park (1993) and Independence Day (1996), along with a myriad of other lower-budget independent films such as The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Earth Girls Are Easy (1988). He has even been known to branch out into different forms of art making, like directing the short film Little Surprises in 1996, or into the world of music in the last few years with his own jazz band.

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