The campaign was directed by Jordan Wolfson, the Los Angeles-based artist whose work has made him one of contemporary art’s most persistent flashpoints. His 2014 piece Female Figure, a robotic sculpture that dances to pop music while staging an unsettling tableau of misogyny, established his appetite for provocation. But it is Real Violence that remains his most notorious feat: A viewer dons a virtual-reality headset and noise-cancelling headphones to watch, for 2½ minutes, a man being beaten with a baseball bat until his head bursts open in grotesque, unflinching detail.
Fashion’s most powerful houses are handing their visual identity to an algorithm. Should the industry finally embrace AI imagery?
In a stark, empty room, Carey Mulligan stalls mid-thought, unable to land the sentence. “I, I, I, I am…” she falters, like a hard drive missing the rest of its command. Towering over the British actress, a pink bird in thigh-high leather boots places a hand on her in a gesture that feels both intimate and predatory. Prada would have you believe that this uncanny scene, from its latest Spring/Summer short film, is art.
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