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...
The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who painted it, when, where or why. And then, a few months ago, everything changed.
The first hour of Anora, Sean Baker says, belongs to the genre of romantic comedy. This makes interesting sense if we are ready to reconsider the meanings of romance and comedy.
Before William Larkin’s identity was established and his oeuvre began to be reconstructed, paintings such as those in the Suffolk Collection were often referred to as “carpet and curtain pictures”...
The tone of the Glasgow School of Art has been one of victimhood, as if the fires were disasters for which the school itself had no responsibility. This, combined with its seeming indifference to the effect...
Soutine straddles a great generational and stylistic gulf in art history, between the cosy 1900s of Post-Impressionist Montmartre and the drip of Pollock, the shock of Bacon, the organic tubular forms...
‘This history is to be told like a fable,’ Warburg explained of the sequences disclosed in the Bilderatlas panels, calling them ‘ghost stories for all adults’. There was no escape from the psychic...
Megalopolis has a beginning and an end, in that order, and more middles than the director or the audience can cope with. Some are interesting and plainly intentional, some are gestures towards an old-fashioned...
To the end of his life, Claud Cockburn stuck to two core beliefs. The first was his instinctive scepticism and cynicism about all who hold authority. But it was his second core belief that really drove...
One of the most fascinating aspects of Wei Shujun’s film Only the River Flows is the continuing contrast between its look and its story, between the faithful realism of the first and the elusive options...
It has been said, with justification, that Kubrick’s films show a preoccupation with violence. Yet his interest is of a peculiarly unexcitable kind, whether the action is grinding, as in trench warfare,...
The loosening up of Freud’s painting occurred while his second marriage was breaking up. He would never marry again. He needed to free himself from emotional ties and, at the same time, he wanted to...