The story South Korea likes to tell about itself is ‘The Miracle on the Han River’, in which a country rises from the ashes of war and dictatorship to become a stylish economic success story. The story...
Positioned higgledy-piggledy in London streets, a battery of defunct cannons threatens to destroy ordinary people’s homes and livelihoods, day-to-day infrastructure and basic amenities, art and nature,...
French moralists are not usually moralisers. They explore moral ground by turning its difficulties into aphorisms. They are because they think; they are frightened by the eternal silence of...
Donatello was driven to devise original solutions by the success of the older Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose mastery of linear perspective in relief sculpture could never be surpassed. But there can be little...
I wonder how we got here. How is it that Vermeer’s paintings now strut the world stage, having skulked for two centuries in the wings? And I wonder where Vermeer himself thought he was heading. What...
Fans make no pretence of balance or reason. They are drunk on irrationality and obstinacy, hurling themselves after the fortunes of their chosen team, band, TV show or celebrity. A fan may feel aggrieved...
What exactly Jim Ede was eludes classification. He was a collector, up to a point, though he never had much money; a patron, but only in a small way; an aspiring artist who never made a career of it; a...
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...
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...
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...
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...