Arts & Culture

The tone of the Glasgow School of Art has been one of victimhood, as if the fires were disasters for which the school itself had no responsibility. This, combined with its seeming indifference to the effect...

Soutine straddles a great generational and stylistic gulf in art history, between the cosy 1900s of Post-Impressionist Montmartre and the drip of Pollock, the shock of Bacon, the organic tubular forms...

‘This history is to be told like a fable,’ Warburg explained of the sequences disclosed in the Bilderatlas panels, calling them ‘ghost stories for all adults’. There was no escape from the psychic...

One of the most fascinating aspects of Wei Shujun’s film Only the River Flows is the continuing contrast between its look and its story, between the faithful realism of the first and the elusive options...

It has been said, with justification, that Kubrick’s films show a preoccupation with violence. Yet his interest is of a peculiarly unexcitable kind, whether the action is grinding, as in trench warfare,...

The loosening up of Freud’s painting occurred while his second marriage was breaking up. He would never marry again. He needed to free himself from emotional ties and, at the same time, he wanted to...

Arthur Russell was a one-man index of all the tempos modern music might use or try out. He made music for every possible mood: something to play during the snoozy afternoon, a 12-inch to light up the dancefloor...

Early in her career Simone Biles was described in ways that made clear that she wasn’t the shape of the supposed ideal gymnast; she was always ‘powerful’ or ‘muscular’. ‘She has no great performance,...

Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...

Roni Horn’s attention here is fixed on something more indefinite than ordinary, obvious reflexivity about image-making and artifice, something that slips between images, between moments, between words...

Velázquez’s portraits give us a more penetrating understanding of the image that the Spanish monarchy wished to convey than any textual description supplied by accounts or pamphlets. The portraits reveal...

Käthe Kollwitz aimed to bend the bourgeois tradition of printmaking to her proletarian content, not to break with it. ‘Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways,’ she once remarked. ‘But...

Last year I narrated Pelé’s My Autobiography – yes, I am the queer voice of the greatest footballer of the 20th century. This presented the challenge of voicing problematic and dated views, especially...

There has been an element of ‘infatuation-driven hyperbole’ in almost everything that has been said and written about Pauline Boty. In her lifetime her physical presence was always part of her reputation....

Again and again, Kauffman portrays herself holding a stylus and portfolio, the symbols not of painting but of drawing, of the intellectual and imaginative efforts that precede the messy work of the brush.

Another title for The Dead Don’t Hurt could be ‘Western Promises’, but this movie is a very late contribution to the genre. Only the worst promises are kept. The familiar nostalgia for loneliness...

The nightingale’s song is punctuated by rich, almost painful pauses. In the silence, one imagines the bird has come to the end of a verse and is considering, with the ease and confidence of a seasoned...

The Village Voice went to press with an invitation to its readers to become its contributors. Forget about being professional writers or journalists, the editors announced. Send us what you find interesting....