Welcome toOne Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
The output of the artist Steve McQueen (b. 1969) is so varied that there need not be a throughline that runs through his oeuvre, and I’m not certain that one does exist. However, when I think about his work, I remember all the times he seemed to draw my attention directly to exactly where he wanted it. Static (2009) takes the viewer in a helicopter circling the Statue of Liberty, showing you each of its features so that you must appreciate it as a sculpture, which we don’t tend to do. Seeing Shame (2011) in the theater, I remember watching the corner of Carey Mulligan’s eye just as a tear welled in it and wondering how he did that.
One of his latest offerings, Bass (2024), has demonstrated his purest control of my perception yet. The work is both simpler and more complicated than anything involving a helicopter or an A-lister, consisting of lights that shift their color and tone as they fill an entire space, amid an original score that is full of a subtle bass. The composition is far less techno rave than you might imagine from the images and “emerged in collaboration with an intergenerational group of musicians from the Black diaspora under the direction of McQueen along with the renowned bassist Marcus Miller, who brought in several other acclaimed musicians: Meshell Ndegeocello and Aston Barrett Jr. (both on electric bass), Mamadou Kouyaté (on ngoni, a traditional West African string instrument) and Laura-Simone Martin (on upright acoustic bass),” per the press materials.
Despite living in New York City, I missed the work when it debuted at Dia Beacon because it somehow made more sense for me to catch it in Basel—it’s been that kind of year. In Beacon, it was in the sprawling basement of that former factory. At the Schaulager, the work was not contained on one floor, taking advantage of over 1,000 LED tubes temporarily installed in the place of the lightly brutal interior of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed space. These lights shift subtly between almost every color of the visible light spectrum, breathing in tune with the music, with such a flow that you will barely notice going from deep red to teal.
McQueen has said that he sought “oceanic frequencies” for the composition, so it’s not original to say that it feels like you’re swimming underwater. Instead, I’ll say it feels like you’re walking around underwater, which is far stranger. I didn’t experience the Beacon iteration, but the effect of inundation must have been stronger in Switzerland, because it featured multiple floors. You felt like you were on the seabed, with leagues above you. Light doesn’t behave that way when you’re that deep down with scuba gear, but you can still feel the currents, and those sensations were recreated by the synchronicity between the music and all the LEDs changing color at the same time.
The perfection of this coordination would almost be enough to make you paranoid, were it not so soothing. This unexpected offering from McQueen shows that he’s still challenging himself and still finding new ways to get into our heads.
Steve McQueen’s Bass is on view at the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel, through November 16, 2025.
Since its founding in 1985, Studio Ghibli has delivered some of the most critically acclaimed and universally beloved animated films of the past four decades.
From the Academy Award-winning Spirited Away to fan-favorite Ponyo, Ghibli films are known for their unique, charming animation style and recurring, relatable themes, making them a comfort watch for many fans from different generations all over the world.
Studio Ghibli films often explore themes of environmentalism and nature, as well as mythology and folklore; family and community; pacifism and war; growing up and responsibility; and otherworldly magic juxtaposed against everyday life.
The Japanese studio’s movies often toggle between ancient tradition and futuristic idealism, crafting immersive, timeless worlds that defy time and expectations, such as in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (which is technically a pre-Ghibli film distributed by Toei). Meanwhile, brave female protagonists such as the heroine of Kiki’s Delivery Service, and expressive, strong-willed children, often play empowering, central roles in their inspiring stories.
Featuring intricately detailed (and often delightfully maximalist) worlds, sweeping natural environments, and cozily inviting homes and villages, the world of Studio Ghibli is one of whimsy, wonder, and warmth, where primarily hand-drawn animation is utilized to create rich, visual storytelling and evoke strong emotions.
While Studio Ghibli’s films are totally singular, and the studio is a singular influential force much like Disney, over the past few decades filmmakers and animators inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s signature work have begun to tell their own stories on screen, drawing influence from the esteemed Japanese animation house.
Below, discover ten gorgeous animated films fans of Studio Ghibli will surely appreciate, whether for their breathtaking visual style, heartfelt themes, or wondrous stories.
Animated Movies Studio Ghibli Fans Would Love
From charming, low-stakes coming-of-age tales to whimsical stories about magic and adventure, fans of Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved Studio Ghibli will love these 10 beautiful animated movies.
Shoutout to the Queen of Millennial Memes, OmgShesAWeirdo. You’ve probably seen her work floating around on the internet at some point, and her comedy speaks for itself.
So I’ve compiled some of her most relatable content and memorable memes that fulfill our nostalgic itch.
I had a crush on this girl named Jaime in college. We met at a party and really hit it off. She then invited me to her place for a party that she was hosting. I was nervous and didn’t know her group of friends. So I began drinking quickly and heavily.
The night must have gotten away from me, and she asked if I was going to stay in her room. Hell yeah. We start doing the deed, and then BLACKOUT. When I woke up I was mid-piss, urinating all over Jaime’s clean clothes – which I assumed was a toilet.
She was furious in the morning and we haven’t spoken since. One night stands, man.
Jamie Foxx is an Oscar winner. And for $150, you can own a veiny blue replica of his head with a crappy movie inside it.
The standard edition of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on Blu-ray currently runs anywhere from $15 to $30. But for an extra Benjamin Franklin, you can get your Amazing Spider-Man 2 inside a light-up version of Jamie Foxx’s cranium, styled to look like his azure-skinned villain from the film, Electro.
Having to look at this sneering, glowing skull every day for the rest of my life (and being reminded of the existence of Amazing Spider-Man 2) sounds more like punishment than selling point. But for some, a bust of Jamie Foxx’s blue head was actually an incentive to purchase the film, and Amazon still has this thing listed on its website. And as extreme and kooky as this thing is, it’s really just scratching the surface of high-end limited edition DVD and Blu-ray box sets.
These days, physical media aficionados with cash to burn can get movies inside leather jackets, shoes, briefcases, buildings, humidors, plus replicas of vans, spaceships, and even castles. The gallery below collects 30 of the most absurd examples from around the world, which range from the hideous to the actually kinda cool (provided you have enough shelf space to display them).
Most of these are out of print (so you can expect to pay a serious premium if you want a T-800 head with Terminator 2 inside) but a few are still available. And, hey, if you want Jamie Foxx’s head on your mantle in perpetuity, there’s a few on eBay right now for less than $50. That’s a shockingly good purchase.
The Craziest DVD and Blu-ray Box Sets Ever Made
You won’t believe some of the movie box sets that have been released through the years.
Timeless television icon, Jaclyn Smith, captured the hearts of audiences with her unforgettable portrayal of Kelly Garrett on the groundbreaking 1976-1981 television series Charlie’s Angels.
With her striking beauty and memorizing presence, she epitomized the vixen archetype, blending beauty with intelligence, a combination that set her apart from her co-stars and skyrocketed her to true stardom.
Known for her sophistication, Smith’s character was not only a skilled detective but also a style icon. With memorable catchphrases like, “We’ll take it from here,” the former Breck Girl left an undeniable impact on the TV landscape.
However, Smith was more than a pretty face; she had the talent to match. Who else could so effortlessly portray the iconic Jacqueline Kennedy and earn a Golden Globe nomination in the process?
Dubbed the “Queen of Mini-Series,” Smith dominated during her reign, and in the process, amassed an impressive filmography of more than fifty film and television appearances.
And, of course, nothing says “celebrity” like your own line of apparel at Kmart!
The seemingly ageless actress continued to have success in television movies, further cementing Smith’s status as a small screen superstar with sex appeal that transcended time.
The decades have not changed this Texas beauty as she remains a true television vixen, appearing just this year in a recurring role on CW series All American.
Regretfully, the golden age of the ringtone is behind us. Now everyone is on full vibrate 24/7 but back when cell phones were were starting out, your custom ringtone was a form of self expression. (And a way to overspend on an mp3 chunk of song.) How were people supposed to react when you got a call in the grocery store? Did you want a jam? A joke? A knowing nod?
We asked our followers on Facebook, X, and Threads and here are your answers.
Installation view, “Your psychoacoustic light ensemble” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Photo by Pierre Le Hors Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles
From colors and qualities of light we cannot perceive accurately to frequencies of sound inaudible to our ears, a significant portion of the phenomena in the cosmos remains out of reach to us. Moving between aesthetics and physics and working at the intersection of art and science, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is known for exploring ephemeral phenomena in his work with dynamic materials like light, color and frequency, which shape our experience of reality even though their complexity often surpasses the limits of our senses.
In his newly opened show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, “Your psychoacoustic light ensemble,” Eliasson delves even deeper into the fringes of perception, playing with light frequencies and exploring sounds and vibrations—an often underrated medium in art—as an essential part of human experience and the universe’s composition. Observer enjoyed an exclusive walkthrough of the show with the artist, who shared insights into the processes and themes his new works examine, challenge and deconstruct to create awareness of how we orient ourselves in this world.
The exhibition’s central installation is an immersive spatial soundscape, an engaging synesthetic experience that harmoniously blends visual and sensory elements. This work is the result of a complex orchestration that translates light into sound through shared frequencies that align with the universe. In this way, circles of light move, expand and interlace in the dark room, tracing the wavelength of sound itself.
“This is a piece of music that is made from the light to the sound, not from the sound to the light,” Olafur explained to us. To achieve this effect, he first crafted and adjusted the exact light composition with mirrors, refining the colors and gradients until they created the desired “painting” of this synthetic environment, which he then completed with sound. Once again, Eliasson demonstrates his ability to use waves and frequencies—whether light or sound—as the primary medium for his compositions.
While light and sound operate in distinct ranges of the electromagnetic and acoustic spectra, the invisible factors of wave frequency and length determine whether we hear a particular sound or see a specific color. Sound is a mechanical wave that travels through a medium (such as air, water, or solids), with the frequency determining if it will produce a low-pitched sound (e.g., bass) or a high-pitched one (e.g., treble). For light, however, it is the frequency or wavelength of the electromagnetic wave that determines color, as Eliasson explains during our walkthrough. He elaborated that every “surface and material has its vibrancy, which regulates the relation with the space.” This synesthetic experimentation creates a meditative, harmonious sequence that transports visitors to another realm, allowing them to sense a hidden harmony within the universe. “It is eventually harmonious; it has this beautiful sense of harmony, like an inhaling and exhaling.”
This installation, which engages both the psyche and the senses through frequencies, lends itself to the show’s title, focused on the concept of “psychoacoustics.” This theme addresses Eliasson’s interest in the inherent relativity of perception and how our senses and their psychological processing shape our experience and understanding of the world—despite the inherent limits that keep many phenomena beyond our full comprehension.
At the gallery entrance, one of his suspended sculptures, Fierce Tenderness Sphere, expands into the space, decomposing light into its spectrum across innumerable quadrangles. With every viewer’s movement, the sculpture shifts, creating an interplay of light, color and form that offers a multifaceted and layered experience, revealing new perspectives and meanings within the same shape.
The works on the second floor continue Eliasson’s investigation of color phenomena, a central concern for much of his work across all media. Photo by Pierre Le Hors Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los AngelesPhoto by Pierre Le Hors
Upstairs, Olafur continues his exploration of color phenomena and how they are perceived and accessible to us, depending on the wavelengths of light that objects reflect, transmit, or emit. As in many of the artist’s works, and much as with sound, humans can only perceive a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum due to our eyes’ receptors (cones) that respond to only specific wavelengths, allowing us to perceive only specific colors. However, this does not mean that this is the only way vision might work in the universe—especially when viewed from a different perspective or with advanced tools.
The concept of color as reflection, emanation or transmission is central to the processes from which the artist’s works originate. “Color does not exist in itself, only when looked at,” he said. “The unique fact that color only materializes when light bounces off a surface onto our retinas shows us that the analysis of colors is, in fact, about the ability to analyze ourselves.”
In the first gallery, the artist is presenting a new body of work: a vibrant watercolor piece in which shades of green and yellow expand circularly and fluidly, as though something has collided at its nucleus and spread outward. Olafur explains that this piece results from a partially intuitive process: allowing an ice cube, along with bleach, to melt on a surface treated with watercolor and ink. Over time, the melting ice activates a transformation of pigments, which expand across the canvas in different gradations, transforming black into green and, eventually, yellow. Here, black—the absence of light and wavelength—is symbolically interrupted by the bleach’s aggressive chemical reaction, allowing color to reemerge as the ice melts and alters the composition.
In a nearby dark room, the artist has installed a band of light containing all colors in the visible spectrum, appearing as a reflection—similar to sunlight hitting glass or the rainbow formed by raindrops. By using bright white light on a colorful arc, he creates a flat reflection resembling a horizon or boreal line that shines out of the darkness. “It’s in darkness that you understand the need for some light,” Olafur enigmatically noted. By staging this light reflection, the artist essentially “paints” within the space with a single, precise stroke that captures all the colors contained in any natural light ray, achieving with scientific precision the “illusion of light” long pursued by painters throughout art history.
Large watercolor works conjure the evanescent luminosity of a rainbow on paper. Photo by Pierre Le Hors Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles
In Tanya Bonakdar’s main sky-lit gallery, the artist has hung large watercolor works that evoke the fleeting luminosity of a rainbow on paper. Here, the interplay between light, color and paint becomes even more nuanced: ethereal watercolors suggest the hues in the visible light spectrum, akin to sunlight reflecting off a white surface. Bathed in the full range of colors, these works attempt to capture something our senses often struggle to fully perceive. As the artist explained, here he is painting “the impossibility of what we can see, painting something that is beyond vision, or saying something that we almost can’t see.”
The works begin with grey paint underneath; when multiple colors accumulate densely, they blend and return to grey. These watercolors are painted on wet surfaces, applied in delicate, repetitive layers in an almost ritualistic manner, allowing colors to emerge only to fade back to grey. “It’s like white paper bouncing through the middle of the color,” Olafur said. The result is works that have a special glow, as if the colors have absorbed the light spectrum that bathed them and now transmit it to the viewer’s eye. This vaporous, diaphanous effect surrounds the viewer, filling the room with color—like sunlight bathing the paper and translating wavelengths into hues and tones that expand through the space.
By challenging and testing viewers’ perceptions of color and light, and this time incorporating sound, Eliasson has crafted an immersive exploration that allows us to understand how perception of these elements shapes our environments. Highlighting the complex relationship between the senses and psyche, Olafur reveals how we navigate them, consciously or otherwise, within an interplay of frequencies and wavelengths that silently and invisibly surround us. This work links all these experiences to a perpetual cycle of energy and particles governed by the cosmos’s largely impenetrable rules. Acknowledging the limitations of sensory perception, Eliasson offers a glimpse into the vast realm beyond our immediate awareness, emphasizing that our understanding of the world is inherently relative.
Olafur Eliasson’s Midnight Moment
Lifeworld by Olafur Eliasson, presented in Times Square as part of the Midnight Moment series. Courtesy of the artist and Times Square Arts.
In addition to the exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar, Olafur Eliasson will present a work in New York City’s Times Square throughout November as part of the Midnight Moment program. Every night from 11:57 pm to midnight, his piece Lifeworld will transform the iconic billboards with a mesmerizing sequence of floating light forms that mimic the cityscape’s vibrant energy. In this work, Eliasson seeks to capture and abstract the essence of the iconic spot by filming its screens from various perspectives, creating an intentional blur that suspends these light stimuli in time and space. Removed from their usual meanings and messages, these stimuli become pure atmosphere, with shimmering abstract shapes and dancing colors inviting viewers to slow down and creatively reimagine the urban landscape.
“It’s a thrill, but the environment also determines my actions—driving me mostly to spend or to consume,” the artist said in a statement. “Lifeworld shows the immediate site anew, and its hazy qualities may prompt questions. If you are suddenly confronted with the reality of having a choice, you might ask what cities, lives and environments we want to inhabit? And how do I want to take part in them?”
This Midnight Moment marks Eliasson’s first project as guest curator for WeTransfer, which has partnered with CIRCA as an exclusive Digital Screen Partner. “By abstracting the energy of Times Square itself, Eliasson’s Lifeworld offers a rare moment of meditation—a poetic gesture on a monumental scale that holds the potential to ground us in a place designed to economize our attention perpetually and in a political climate that offers little psychic reprieve,” said Jean Cooney, Director of Times Square Arts. “We’re excited to present this timely and distinctive Midnight Moment and join this global collaboration.” Coinciding with the Times Square display, Lifeworld also appears every evening at 8:24 p.m. local time through December 31 on Piccadilly Lights in London, K-Pop Square in Seoul, Limes Kurfürstendamm in Berlin and online 24/7 on WeTransfer.com.
Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Psychoacustic Light Ensemble” is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through December 19. The show is timed with the November presentation of his work “Lifeworld in Times Square, part of the “Midnight Moment” initiative.
Halloween seems like the perfect opportunity to give the lovely and talented, Jody Steel her flowers. The makeup artist and cosplay icon has partnered with CBS and has also been featured on Freeform’s ’25 Days of Christmas.’
Her shadowing techniques are next-level, and it’s as if she thinks of her face as a blank canvas for any given character.
Steel’s skill and beauty have us geeking out. Give her a follow HERE.
Being a writer, I’ve had more than my fair share of interactions with trolls. But sometimes you just have to tip your hat to them. There are folks out there who have the quick wit and more importantly, the balls to post some of the craziest shit you’ve ever seen.
We’ve compiled a batch of some all-star troll jobs. Break out the lotion, you might need it after these burns.
After our previous ‘hot for teacher’ gallery, you had to know this one was on deck. For those of you thinking about going to Grad School, or maybe just taking a few courses here and there, we’ve got you covered.
Again I give these lovely ladies all the credit in the world for choosing to educate future generations. Because if I had to do what they do, I’d crumble up into a ball on the floor.
If we’re talking adolescent celebrity crushes then Daphne Zuniga is very close to the top of that list. With all due respect to the one and only Carrie Fisher, something changed in me when I saw Princess Vespa’s off the shoulder wedding gown. Sheesh.
So we’d like to celebrate actress, Daphne Zuniga on her 62nd birthday. From Spaceballs, to Melrose Place, to One Tree Hill, the bombshell brunette has always had us in our feels.
