Philip Oltermann

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Philip Oltermann

One of Europe’s largest music festivals will no longer be held in Serbia and could go “into exile” in Germany or a neighbouring Balkan state after Belgrade withheld funding over its support of the country’s anti-corruption student protesters. Exit festival, which is held every July in a medieval bastion fortress in Serbia’s second city, Novi Sad, was founded in 2000 by student activists from the protest movement that helped topple Slobodan Milošević.

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Philip Oltermann

They created some of the most riveting abstract art of the 20th century, fought Nazis with the gun and the pen, married, divorced and married again. Now the continent-spanning and nigh-forgotten love story of the Burton-Tayloresque couple at the heart of the European avant garde is finally being given its due at a major art institution.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Philip Oltermann

One of Austria’s leading newspapers has severed ties with a Hollywood reporter after admitting she repackaged old comments by Clint Eastwood and presented them as a supposedly exclusive interview. In an apparent journalistic coup, the Vienna-based daily Kurier published a Q&A with Eastwood last Friday and it was picked up around the world over the weekend due to the Oscar-winning actor’s outspoken criticism of Hollywood’s “era of remakes and franchises”.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Philip Oltermann

A 200-year-old illustrated condom will go on display with Dutch golden age masters in Amsterdam this week, after the 19th-century “luxury souvenir” became the first-ever contraceptive sheath to be added to the Rijksmuseum’s art collection. The condom, which was probably made of a sheep’s appendix circa 1830, is thought to have come from an upmarket brothel in France, most likely in Paris.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Philip Oltermann

If Donald Trump really wants to save Hollywood, maybe he needs to venture outside his comfort zone and watch more European art house cinema. The Cannes film festival, which closes on Saturday, is in many ways the very definition of the “globalism” that the American president’s Maga movement despises. Walk past the queues snaking alongside the Palais des Festivals and you hear languages and accents from every corner of the globe.