The Quiet Revolution in Scandinavian Contemporary Art
Scandinavian contemporary art has achieved international prominence while refusing the spectacle that characterises much of the global art market.
James Alderton · 2024-10-25
Culture
Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
Showing 41–60 of 168 articles
What Orson Welles Understood About Showmanship and Solitude
Orson Welles was twenty-five years old when Citizen Kane premiered in 1941, and he spent the remaining forty-four years of his life living with the consequences of having peaked at the beginning.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-10-25
How David Lean Made Landscapes Into Characters
David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, released in 1962, uses the Arabian desert not as a setting but as a protagonist — an antagonist, even, whose vastness, heat, and silence shape T.
Catherine Avery · 2024-10-24
Why Thomas Mann Still Repays Slow Reading
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, follows a young German engineer who visits a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, for three weeks and stays for seven years.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-10-24
What Bach Can Teach You About Structure in Any Field
Johann Sebastian Bach's fugues — compositions in which a single melodic theme is introduced, then systematically developed through repetition, variation, inversion, and combination — represent the most rigorous structural thinking in Western art.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-10-23
The Cultural Weight of the Dinner Table
The dinner table is the most underestimated piece of furniture in domestic architecture.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-10-23
On Silence as a Creative Practice
John Cage's 4'33", first performed by David Tudor at Woodstock, New York in 1952, consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of a pianist sitting at a piano without playing a note.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-10-22
The Photographers Who Documented an Entire City Block for Thirty Years
In 1969, Danny Lyon began photographing the demolition of Lower Manhattan's Washington Street neighbourhood — sixty acres of nineteenth-century commercial buildings razed to make way for the World Trade Center and Battery Park City.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-10-22
How One Film Festival Changed Independent Cinema Forever
The Sundance Film Festival, founded by Robert Redford in 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival and renamed in 1991, did not merely showcase independent film — it created the market for it.
William Ashford · 2024-10-21
The Renaissance of the Independent Literary Magazine
The Paris Review, founded by George Plimpton in 1953 from a café in the Marais, has survived seven decades by maintaining a singular editorial principle: publish the work, not the name.
James Alderton · 2024-10-21
What Abstract Expressionism Demanded of Its Audience
When Jackson Pollock's drip paintings first appeared at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1948, the critical establishment split between those who saw revolutionary art and those who saw an elaborate hoax.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-10-20
The Bookshops of Buenos Aires and the Readers They Attract
Buenos Aires has more bookshops per capita than any other city in the world — a statistic that reflects not commercial opportunity but cultural identity.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-10-20
The Second Act of Jazz: How Young Musicians Are Rewriting the Canon
Makaya McCraven, a drummer and producer based in Chicago, has developed a creative method that would have been technologically impossible a generation ago: he records live improvisations, then deconstructs and reassembles them in the studio, layering beats, samples, and effects to create compositions that are simultaneously acoustic jazz and electronic music.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-10-19
Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and the Grammar of Action Cinema
Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, released in 1954, established the structural template that virtually every action film has followed since: a group of specialists, each with a distinct skill and personality, is assembled for a mission that requires their collective effort.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-10-19
The Sculptures You Walk Past Without Knowing Their Names
Auguste Rodin's The Burghers of Calais exists in twelve bronze casts worldwide, several of them installed at ground level in public spaces where pedestrians navigate around the figures without recognising one of the most important sculptural groups of the nineteenth century.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-10-18
Why Albert Camus Is the Philosopher for Uncertain Times
Albert Camus's central philosophical proposition — that life is absurd, that the universe offers no inherent meaning, and that this condition is not a tragedy but a starting point — has acquired fresh urgency in a period defined by institutional failure, pandemic disruption, and the erosion of certainties that previous generations took as given.
Catherine Avery · 2024-10-18
Richard Avedon and the Photograph That Changed Fashion
In 1955, Richard Avedon photographed the model Dovima standing between two elephants at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris, wearing a Dior evening gown designed by Yves Saint Laurent.
William Ashford · 2024-10-17
How Public Radio Shaped a Generation of Curious Men
Ira Glass's This American Life, which premiered on Chicago's WBEZ in 1995, did not invent narrative radio but it codified its modern form: a theme, three or four acts, first-person narration that was simultaneously confessional and analytical, and a production aesthetic that valued awkward pauses and verbal stumbles as markers of authenticity.
James Alderton · 2024-10-17
When Design Becomes Invisible, It's Working
Dieter Rams's ten principles of good design, formulated during his tenure at Braun from 1961 to 1995, culminate in the tenth: 'Good design is as little design as possible.
Marcus Wei · 2024-10-16
The Ethics of Collecting Antiquities in the Twenty-First Century
The Parthenon Marbles — removed from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin between 1801 and 1812, currently housed in the British Museum — represent the most visible case in an ongoing ethical debate that extends far beyond any single collection.
Catherine Avery · 2024-10-16