Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
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Showing 41–60 of 168 articles
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 · 2026-05-16
Scandinavian contemporary art has achieved international prominence while refusing the spectacle that characterises much of the global art market.
James Alderton · 2026-05-16
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 · 2026-05-16
The I-V-vi-IV chord progression — in the key of C, that is C major, G major, A minor, F major — underlies an estimated one-quarter of all pop songs released since 1970.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-16
Yasujirō Ozu's films contain almost no dramatic events in the conventional sense.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-16
Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project — a vast collection of quotations, observations, and theoretical fragments assembled between 1927 and 1940 — proposed the Parisian arcade as a key to understanding modern capitalism.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-16
Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, spanning over eight hundred missives written between 1872 and 1890, constitute one of the most extraordinary documents of artistic development in Western history.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-16
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 · 2026-05-15
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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 · 2026-05-15
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 · 2026-05-15
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 · 2026-05-15
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 · 2026-05-15
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 · 2026-05-15
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 · 2026-05-15
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 · 2026-05-15
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 · 2026-05-15
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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 · 2026-05-15
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 · 2026-05-15
The first conversation took place at Peter Harrington in Mayfair, London's oldest rare bookshop, where a first edition of The Great Gatsby — Scribner's 1925 printing, dark green cloth boards with gilt lettering — sat in a vitrine priced at two hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds.
William Ashford · 2026-05-14
Chet Baker's singing voice — a barely-there whisper, intimate as a confession, with no vibrato and no attempt at projection — violated every convention of mid-century male vocal performance.
William Ashford · 2026-05-14