It began with the beheading of a god. In a dispute over theological primacy, Brahma – traditionally identified as the creator – insulted Shiva. The offended deity poured all his...
Much of what Pauline Kael had to say in ‘Raising Kane’ (1971), her long article in the New Yorker, got lost in the controversy it created. One of her aims was to draw attention to...
The football played in England today – the speed, the spectacle, the insane athleticism, the obsession with the distance a player has run, the Gegenpressing, the stats, Pep, Klopp, Mo Salah, Kevin...
What interested Rembrandt and his contemporaries, as it interests those attempting to reconcile the archival record of historical black Amsterdam with its visual remains, was the ways in which artists...
The poet Linton Kwesi Johnson calls the first two generations of Caribbean people in postwar Britain the ‘heroic’ generation and the ‘rebel’ generation. The Windrush...
Beethoven was everything at once – impatient, brave, long-suffering, petty, short-tempered, honest, generous to his friends, cruel to his family, ductile and intractable, worldly and deeply innocent....
Smith wasn’t the first to notice that the layers in the pits were predictable in their order; miners had long used the rock formations as wayfinders. They had names for the various types of exposed...
Rosie Lee Tompkins’s work is attuned to all the nuances of race, gender and class that fabric can signify. Synthetic calico is set next to a Mexican serape poncho which is placed next to an Indian...
There’s a shaggy horse drawn in charcoal 13,000 years ago on a wall of the Niaux cave in Southern France, and every frisky hatching looks as though it could have been set down yesterday by a student...
Maradona was under no illusions about football’s symbolic power, or its limits. He couldn’t solve anyone’s problems, least of all his own. But, for ninety minutes at a time, he could...
Perhaps the great women artists are nocturnal creatures who prefer to create freely in the darkness. In this way, too, they avoid being referred to as ‘one of these neurotics’. Perhaps...
When we think of Marlene Dietrich’s films, innocence is not the first word that comes to mind. But there is something unmarked about her persona, as if the ironic wisdom her characters often express...
Like the pictures that Fénéon most admired, his texts aim to be ‘self-governing’ – like communes, we are prompted to think. This autonomy takes nothing away from the singularity...
Thin, skimpy dresses left women cold and more susceptible to illness (flu was ‘muslin disease’), perhaps even to consumption, which was believed to bring women to the peak of beauty before...
It’s an old narrative device and a very effective one: to provide the day or month without mentioning the year. Garrett Bradley’s new feature-length documentary, Time (on Amazon...
In 1660, a Commonwealth warship called HMS Naseby sailed to the Dutch Republic to bring the new king-in-waiting home to England. During its journey the ship was renamed the Royal Charles in...
Trevor Paglen’s works are information sublimated: the learning they represent could be conveyed in words – thousands of them – but as images they’re wired direct to the brain.
Suddenly, there was nothing to complain about. No cruise ships went up the Giudecca Canal. There were no tourists clogging up the narrow streets. Piazza San Marco was often completely deserted....