Arts & Culture

Steven Spielberg uses the extraterrestrial as a stand-in for almost anything strange. It’s not always a virtue, but there may be interesting thoughts behind the ragged obvious ones. Think of the...

Zurbarán has always seemed to me an engaging but second division painter. Seeing many of his paintings across all the genres together, I realised I was wrong. They are mesmerising.

The music Bernard Herrmann wrote for The Wrong Man is diffident, sometimes almost unnoticeable. His score for Hitchcock’s next film, Vertigo, is loud, lushly romantic and Wagnerian. But in some...

Bad magic attracts bad money. Brion Gysin had a preternatural instinct for the fluctuations of the art market, high-capitalist juju with its social and sexual entanglements as an extension of the souk....

Deindustrialisation was not a long, slow process but a very quick one, erasing whole occupations and transforming one community and family after another. Britain was still a manufacturing and distinctly...

Nigeria is a complicated recipient of Western largesse: elites welcome it so long as domestic players, for whom it may not have been intended, get their share. Among those elites are wealthy Nigerians...

Celia Paul’s writings give every impression of translucency and quivering confession; she is an artist of self-exposure, of hurt and sorrow, both on canvas and on the page. Her confidences inspire...

The Artists International Association created the sort of art which has had critical manure heaped on it since the 1940s: realist, figurative, agitational, achingly sincere. It was a product of the sort...

Marilyn Monroe’s image, after Warhol, is still encoded with a vulnerability we instantly recognise, which makes us want to save her or explain her all over again. The real Marilyn has been dust...

Baselitz did not make overtly political art. He felt that what mattered in painting existed on a deeper level than subject or style. His ‘degenerate’ work was not only a means of compensating...

Screwballs aren’t miserabilist-humanist comedies about learning to revel in imperfection; they’re comedies of fantasy and will. With enough conviction, craziness starts to make sense.

Sid Caesar’s brand of intelligent laughter – satirical, sketch-driven, character-based, artful – stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. It was ‘like seeing a new country’,...

Beneath the whimsy and the wit, Agnès Varda’s films were motivated by contradiction and critique. She said she was always looking for ‘the cliché and what’s inside the...

Eighty years on, Dead of Night stands as an astute meditation on repression and madness. Time, however, has dulled the cultural historical implications. The absence of references to the war only makes...

‘A psalm consoles the sad, restrains the joyful, tempers the angry, refreshes the poor and chides the rich man to know himself,’ wrote Niceta of Remesiana, a fourth-century bishop from what...

In​ 1973, when a Marcel Duchamp retrospective was last staged in the United States, the critic Lucy Lippard declared that too much was made of him already. More than fifty years later he is still...

Caxton’s early interest in print was probably commercial rather than technical, that of a publisher rather than an inventor. But his interest in literature ran deep, not only as a reader but also...

Meursault, in Camus’s novel, speaks of the ‘absurd’ life he leads. He also says: ‘It’s common knowledge that life is not worth living.’ A man who killed another man...