Arts & Culture

This​ is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my...

Unlike large oil paintings, miniatures demand to be experienced close up. They had the great virtue of being portable – and, therefore, of helping to create intimacy (or the illusion of intimacy) over...

By the end of 1979, hesitation had given way to dread. We fully expected to be facing the end of the world. Margaret Thatcher had been elected; Russia invaded Afghanistan; Reagan announced he was running...

On​ the morning of 18 April 2023, the chess grandmaster Ding Liren was discussing tactics with his coach. He was due to play game 7 of his world championship match against Ian Nepomniachtchi that afternoon....

Cyclicality – its rhythms, its humour – is central to Nan Goldin’s work. A title such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, with its reference to a song, indicates something of the claim the work...

Stanford was among the first composers in Britain to write church music that was not automatically relegated to the background; and it was Stanford who, through being professor of music at both Cambridge...

The point of the show isn’t to prove that reproductions fail to do justice to the original. The curators argue instead that reproductions have much to tell us about the production of art-historical...

Despite the importance of the architectural meaning of the film’s title, the other meaning, the wrong meaning, is also intimately everywhere, and Brady Corbet does tempt us to believe that nothing and...

It's largely thanks to Loach's example that social realism remains a potent and versatile cultural resource for young filmmakers with something to say about working-class experience in Britain here and...

This is what’s weird about Tinguely: what should be forbidding and abstract – mechanised geometries, industrial detritus – is full of personality. Clearly, people were drawn to him, and he was drawn...

Can the art of political photomontage continue to function as print declines and memes both crude and ingenious proliferate?

Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size. His rambling, vindictive, uninflected shtick...

Abba became a vehicle for a kind of wholesome perversity, a nonconformist conformism: two picture-perfect couples shattered by divorce; four unimpeachable heterosexuals beloved by multiple generations...

Hew Locke asks us to consider imperial power as a grim yet alluring excess of the symbolic, not just as the exercise of brute force. The proliferating connections – from object to object and among the...

Nicola L.’s functional objects ratchet up the intensity: her soft sculptures are laced with menace. A tugged-open drawer for a vagina, a grasped nipple for a handle: this is the female body served up...

Why do architecture and furniture of a century ago still look new, while clothes, cars and even people appear so dated? How did modern design – clean lines, white walls, geometric volumes, open plans,...

In no sense was Frank Auerbach a topographical artist. Primrose Hill, Mornington Crescent and the entrance to his studio were his only external frames of reference from the 1960s. Auerbach’s London...

The global spread of ayahuasca has been driven by two overlapping beliefs in its possibilities: as a life-changing spiritual experience and as a miraculous healing intervention. Both of these bear an at...