Luc Tuymans’s painting Altar (2002) depicts a wedding chapel in a Mormon temple. It’s a space that only church members are allowed to enter, so – as Ralph Rugoff recounts in the...
Memories of Watteau were important to those who knew him. Thirty-seven when he died of tuberculosis in 1721, he was the subject of seven 18th-century biographies, only two of them by strangers....
I heard a few bars of Chris Corner’s song ‘I Salute You Christopher’ a day or so before the new IAMX album, Volatile Times, was released. The song, which appears on the album,...
The latest wave of the Scandinavian crime invasion: Sarah Lund and her woolly jumpers. The Killing, the powerfully addictive Danish crime drama running on BBC4 on Saturday nights, has become the...
The finest moment in Julie Taymor’s film of The Tempest occurs when the story has ended. Behind the credits a book drifts down through water, its leather covers separating from its bound...
‘About twelve noon on 13 November 1951, at a distance of about 200 yards, two distinct humps … something like a couple of ducks, not anything like a porpoise, or a walrus, or a whale,...
The Three Kings in Jan Gossaert’s Adoration of the Kings are lavishly dressed and richly supplied with gifts. The building in which they have discovered the Nativity is a handsome ruin. The...
Academics: beware of loving what you write about. Fandom can tempt intellectuals to take uncharacteristic risks with their primary sources. Even Stanley Fish, who as the author of Is There a Text...
Over the last decade or so critical theory has seen a marked turn to questions of ‘bare’ and ‘creaturely’ life. Why this interest in such threshold states? What’s at...
I don’t remember when I was first irritated by that children’s rhyme, which is wrong twice over. Oil painting may well be hard but in some ways it’s easier than painting in...
‘Don’t be diabolical,’ a title card says at the end of the film. ‘Don’t destroy the interest your friends might take in this film. Don’t tell them what you...
I can’t for the life of me remember why I was so bad-tempered the first time I saw a show of Gabriel Orozco years ago in New York. Orozco’s mid-career retrospective at Tate Modern...
‘In T.S. Eliot we find the poet as farmer’: now that truly is revisionist. If the pin-striped modernist with the ‘features of clerical cut’ ever put his hand to a...
Camille Pissarro, the great Impressionist painter, spent a year in England escaping from the Franco-Prussian War. His eldest son, Lucien, spent more than half his life here. Lucien was the...
In 2006 I was invited to take part in one of the great adventures of modern broadcasting – conquering the booming Russian television market. The company I was hired by, Potemkin...
The longest-lived of camera films has just ended its 75-year history. The only laboratory that still processed Kodachrome, the first commercially available colour slide film, stopped doing so at...
‘Pastoral scene of the gallant South’, Billie Holiday sang, evoking a landscape of lynched bodies. This was the ‘strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees’. Certainly a...
If you grew up in the 1940s and 1950s anywhere in the English-speaking world where American magazines were more likely to be found than European ones, places where the culture was popular not...