The National Museum in Oslo is running Don’t Be Afraid. An Exhibition about Death until 6 September 2026, while White Cube in London opens Emma Reyes on 4 September 2026 and Netflix lines up The Gentlemen season 2 for 3 September. Europe’s culture machine is busy this week. It packages death, gangster glamour, and glossy melancholy as entertainment, then sells the whole lot back to the public as choice.
Death, Curated for the Public
At the National Museum in Oslo, Norway, Don’t Be Afraid. An Exhibition about Death brings together works by Nan Goldin, Adolph Tidemand, Sandra Mujinga and many more. The show, which runs until 6 September 2026, explores how different experiences, beliefs and cultures shape the way people view and decipher the unknowns of life’s endings. The article quotes the English philosopher Francis Bacon: “it is as natural to die as it is to be born.” That line sits neatly inside a museum programme, where death becomes an object to be interpreted rather than a condition imposed by power, war, poverty, or neglect. The institution frames the subject as reflection. The calendar does the rest.
White Cube in London, UK, opens Emma Reyes on 4 September 2026 and keeps it on view until 3 October 2026. The late Columbian painter’s work is described as vivid, with distinct latin American qualities, shaped by her cultural heritage and traditions. The article says Reyes had a particular affinity for faces and flora, and that her works are textured with colour, lines and repeating patterns, almost hallucinogenic, with subjects so bright and hypnotic they seem to swallow your vision. The retrospective draws on examples from her almost six decade-long career. That’s the art world’s preferred form of seriousness: a controlled room, a controlled audience, and a controlled story about what counts as culture.
The roundup also notes that The Sun and The Moon: Art Inspired by the Celestial is entering its final week at London’s Saatchi Gallery. Even the sky gets a closing date.
Gangsters, Priories, and Platform Crime
In cinemas on 2 September, A24’s The Death of Robin Hood offers a dark reimagining of the mythical outlaw. Hugh Jackman plays Robin Hood as a tortured soul consumed by rage and bitterness after becoming dangerously wounded. He seeks refuge at a priory run by a kind nun, played by Jodie Comer, and begins a reckoning with the evil deeds of his past. The film is described as a bleak character study that contemplates the cost of violence. That’s the pitch: violence as prestige drama, rebellion as brand material, and the outlaw turned into a private crisis.
The 83rd Venice Film Festival begins this week and runs from 2 to 12 September 2026. The article places it alongside the film release, as if the machinery of European culture needs a festival frame to make the whole arrangement feel alive. It does. Just not in the way the brochures suggest.
On Netflix, The Gentlemen season 2 arrives on 3 September 2026 after an almost two and a half year hiatus. Guy Ritchie’s hit gangster series, a spin-off from his 2019 movie of the same name, follows Eddie Horniman, played by Theo James, who inherited his father’s estate and the criminal enterprise attached to it. He is drawn into organised crime through the intimidating charm of drug baron Bobby Glass, played by Ray Winstone, as societal worlds collide and Eddie navigates the knotty networks of a volatile underworld. The article calls it funny and tense, and praises Ritchie’s trademark dark British humour and glossy violence, along with a stellar cast. The inheritance is the point. Property comes first. Crime comes attached.
Melancholy as Product
Ellie Goulding: I Know Too Much is out on 4 September 2026, three years after Higher Than Heaven. The article says the new album shifts from a pure party vibe to something more personal, pondering life’s transitions and the bliss of letting go of self-consciousness, stress and the feeling that people need to make sense of it all. Tracks including Black Prada Dress and 4 Seasons are said to simmer in an uplifting sort of melancholy, while Ravers reasserts Goulding’s ability to sweep listeners up into a synthy state of euphoric abandon. Rebecca Black’s Age of the Exhibitionist is also out on 4 September 2026.
The culture roundup keeps moving, from museum walls to streaming platforms to club-ready synths, but the structure barely changes. Institutions curate feeling. Platforms distribute it. Festivals bless it. The public is invited to consume death, crime, and self-invention in carefully managed doses, while the people who actually live under the systems that produce violence, displacement, and exhaustion get a soundtrack, a poster, and a release date.