From the economic point of view, this was the year video games overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share of the take is forecast to be £4.64...
Gus Van Sant’s new film, Milk, is thoughtful, patient, funny and touching, and both Sean Penn and James Franco should get Oscars, but it doesn’t answer the questions any biopic raises...
In the recent Pixar movie Wall-E there is a conflict between two different visions of technology. From one angle, technology appears to be humanity’s overlord: the movie imagines that in...
Pierre Boulez took his final bow in the opera pit last summer at the Aix-en-Provence festival. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the production was the music chosen: Leoš...
‘When Lot lived in Sodom and Gomorrah,’ Peter wrote in his Second Epistle, ‘he was oppressed and tormented day after day by their lawless deeds.’ Having grown up in...
Stenography is dying out; so are stenographers. When I mention that I’m working on the history of shorthand, people tell me that their mother knew shorthand, or their grandmother, or their...
The first thing you see in the Byzantium 330-1453 exhibition at the Royal Academy (until 22 March 2009) is one of the last of the objects on display to have been made, a huge 13th or 14th-century...
Whatever else it may be, Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (now available on DVD from Artificial Eye) does not resemble the afternoon bill at the old Plaza or the new Cineplex....
Surfaces in pale earth colours – brown, grey and buff – scraped and rescraped until they look like a wall ready for papering. Backgrounds overlaid with strong accents in brown and...
In the United States the flag has the status of a religious icon, a totem. It cannot be carried horizontally or flat, but must always be ‘aloft and free’. There is a protocol for...
James Cuno is currently the director of the Art Institute of Chicago. He used to be the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London; before that he was the director of the Harvard...
There are something under a hundred pictures, and more than a hundred faces, in Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, at the National Gallery until 18 January. Some of the pictures stick firmly...
About three years ago, with time to kill, I climbed an unlit staircase behind a fire door at the back of the Barbican Centre. There was no one around. With its forty acres of 1960s Brutalist...
There are several excellent reasons for not wanting to make a film based on a book called Blindness, and Fernando Meirelles knows them all. But knowing them, and even treating them as challenges,...
In the second, narrow room of the Tate Modern exhibition Rothko: The Late Series a single canvas fills most of one of the long walls. Rothko, who wanted people to have the experience of being...
Joseph Rykwert is unhappy about the current condition of architecture, the principal subject of his long career as a historian. In the conclusion to The Judicious Eye, he complains that...
Claude Monet’s first breakthrough was not the ‘impression’ of a sunrise that lent its name to a movement but a full-length figure in contemporary dress that he submitted to the...
Frankly, it doesn’t much matter if the players don’t know where they are, so long as the fans are there to welcome them. What these new owners want is a club with a clear sense of identity, around...