Wild Isles doesn’t explicitly advocate for returning the water companies to public ownership (a policy backed by 69 per cent of the population but by neither of the leading political parties). But it...
For all Spotify’s talk of ‘discovery’, the thing it really cares about is what Mike, the chief scientist at Willow, calls ‘the hang-around factor’. If someone skips a song, or stops listening...
Clive Bell was admired for his intellect and range, but his refusal to settle to one way of life meant that he was also regarded as flippant, a poseur with neither the seriousness nor the intelligence...
If only the everyday were so richly textured, bright, precious and considered. Hannah Starkey’s photographs suggest that, given time and the right conditions, transformative details might bring forth...
If Meret Oppenheim’s sculpture reads as feminine, or as having to do with femininity, it is because women are associated with certain rituals and labours (pouring tea or ‘being mother’). Object is...
Its appeal is part of the recurrent cycle of the centripetal giving way to the lure of the burbs. Save that, in this instance, it’s not the lure that accounts for an invasion of beards and craft beer...
‘I am, always was, and always will be violently optimistic,’ Preston Sturges said. ‘I knew at twenty that I was going to be a millionaire. I know it today. In between times, I have been.’ The...
The Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña is interested in art as protest and in protest as spectacle, but she seems as insistent on possibility as on past wrongdoing. This is a gentle environment in which to...
In my horror and despair, in those first weeks, particularly when the systemic cruelty of the Russian military showed itself – not just towards civilians and the Ukrainian military, but towards its own...
Charles Lamb believed that books should be read, and that close reading could and should leave material traces. In an ironic piece on book-borrowers, he praised his friend Coleridge, who had returned...
For Bois, not only is form responsive to history, and historical situations inscribed in artistic transformations, but any such transformation is accountable to its present, and it is only thus that it...
A middle-aged man – Ha Sang-hyun, played by Song Kang-ho – looks tenderly at a baby and asks: ‘How could anyone throw him away?’ This has been interpreted as a sentimental moment in a sentimental...
The history of rebellion is always seductive. But the history of bone music suggests that state repression didn’t always loom as large in the lives of Soviet people as we might expect. What the stilyagi...
For some, it’s a genuine community: a safe haven of soothers and tingle-seekers, a tool for anxiety relief and relaxation, amateur in style but extremely lucrative for independent self-described ASMRtists....
Archer Huntington called these objects ‘specimens’ and, for all its treasures, his collection was a product of late Victorian ethnography that painted the Spanish as an essentially ‘oriental’ race....
The question of agency here is vexed and political (it’s also gendered). Does the authorship of Hilma af Klint’s spiritualist paintings lie with the medium or her spirit guides? And why do so many...
Drawing was never just drawing: Joseph Beuys was already thinking, it seems, in terms of an expanded notion of what art might be; a drawing might show nature, but also itself appear as a fragment of the...
At the interface of the orchestra and the audience the conductor is the recipient of two quite different waves of transference. At his back, an amorphous crowd of strangers beam expectation at him. They...