Swipe Right to Purchase This Picasso

Plus: the Internet road trip that is currently in Maine

Welcome to Small Talk, an email I serve out every Monday morning exclusively to our Breakfast Club members in NYC and Charleston. The premise is simple: my top of mind topics for the week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners ahead anytime some chatter is required. From now on, I’ll be sharing it with subscribers of The Supersonic as well. Enjoy, and crib topics as necessary.

To quote that perennially quotable of films, "The Big Lebowski," “lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous.” Such is the news cycle these days. Amid the chaos, here are the stories you might’ve missed. As always, pull the ones that interest you most and use them any time the dinner table chatter runs dry this week.

For consideration …

• Cannes stand it
  The Cannes Film Festival is currently going on across the pond. Early buzz surrounds films like "Die My Love," starring Jennifer Lawrence, and "The Chronology of Water" by Kristin Stewart, her directorial debut, plus work by typical festival contenders Wes Anderson and Ari Aster. Also: "Mission Impossible — The Final Reckoning," which got a five-minute standing ovation. In fact, all the films mentioned above got considerable standing ovations (heck, even an X-rated movie got one). Said standing ovations are a bit of tradition at Cannes, with the longest ever clocking in at 22-minutes for "Pan’s Labyrinth" in 2006. Vulture is Moneballing how each film faired ovation wise (right down to the decimal) at this year’s festival. Which leads one to ask: what up with standing ovations? Turns out, they weren’t always timed, until news outlets realized using such metrics made for clicky stories. Thus, there’s a love/hate relationship with the practice. Even more confounding? How the festival works. Increasingly, however, Cannes—which has been around since 1946—determines which movies succeed or fail, both at the box-office and award season.
  

• Subscription coded
  I know we all love a good subscription, but maybe not as much as AMC’s A-Listers. For $20-$28 a month, the club’s nearly one million members can go to four movies per week, plus get other perks like VIP concession lines. It’s become a meme online, and a core personality trait of members — “[it’s] my Roman Empire, my TED Talk.” AMC A-Listers is definitely cinephile coded, but is it left or right coded? The Style section does the deep dive on coded, certainly the word of these strange times, one that “sorts the shifty, amorphousness of culture into the hard and fast lines of our polarized politics.” For the auction house coded, there’s Fair Warning, an invitation-only app that allows aficionados to bid on artwork by swiping right, as if they were on Tinder. The app was created, and currently curated, by Loïc Gouzer, the former Christie’s wunderkind responsible for "the sale of the most expensive artwork in history — Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450 million in 2017.” For Fair Warning, Gouzer only allows personal tastes, not market forces, decide what makes it to auction. As in, would he hang the artwork on his own wall? And here’s another figure who might be determining who buys what: Pope Leo, whose White Sox fandom is boosting merch sales.
  

• Internet wanderlust
  The Internet is upset. That’s because Luke Nichols, the creator behind Outdoors Boys—a YouTube channel with some 15 million subscribers—is taking a break from content, perhaps indefinitely. Nichols made the announcement over the weekend, citing a discomfort with his family’s lives being viewed by so many people, meaning we won’t be getting any more winter survival videos in Alaska or shenanigans with his kids. Truly, it was one of the more wholesome corners of the Internet, and the dude will be missed. Still, there’s some heartwarming stuff online. Like the thousands of people currently taking a virtual road trip with Google Street View. The rules are simple: every ten seconds, those taking the trip vote via Discord on what direction to take (they even can listen to local radio stations). At the time of this writing, the road trip is currently in Ellsworth, Maine. One person who might approve of such whimsy? Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who is broadening his company’s purview to now include … everything. Airbnb a Michelin-starred chef. Airbnb an architectural tour. Airbnb a wrestling match. Etc. Experiences, not tech, is what Chesky values. “Magic, in hindsight, is not technology,” he tells Wired. “I’ve never had a dream with a device in it.” Cheers to that.

Quicker hits …

• Mr. Beast is giving Zuck a run for his money with his new glow up.

• Can McDonald's cure migraines?

• Why the HBO rebrand didn't work.

• Open AI plans for a data center bigger than Monaco.

• Speaking of Monaco, the Grand Prix is this weekend. Is this the greatest Monaco qualifying lap of all time?
  

Enjoy your week.

BL

Ben Leventhal
Founder + CEO
Blackbird