Beyond or beneath the theatrics there is a disconcerting sense that something much more serious is going on, that all the hokum and stage magic might be misdirection of the sort that enables something...
Jean Epstein compared going to a movie to entering a state of hypnosis, an aesthetic experience that ‘modifies the nervous system’ much more than reading does. And it would be perverse to deny that...
It is on the border between the ordinary and the peculiar that Martin Parr likes to work. He points out, more than once, that what is commonplace now will one day be remarkable. Too often the texture of...
The mummy portraits are stunning. Their production began around 30-40 ce, sixty or so years after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium and the beginning of Roman rule. This brought to an end almost...
Avigdor Arikha became the archivist of the everyday: not, it seems, because he sought out the ordinary but because each day invited his urgent attention. He spoke about ‘lying in ambush’ until a subject...
The film frame is both Walter Murch’s canvas and his found object. In his editing suite, whether mechanical or digital, he is painting with light and sound, looking for the emotional narrative ‘hook’...
In the late 1960s, the critic Bevis Hillier invented the term ‘Art Deco’ for the commercial architecture of the 1930s – it was used by nobody in that decade. Mid-Century Modern would have been called...
A passive-aggressive ‘lying flat’ attitude is easily dismissed as laziness, but Gen Z-ers have developed a philosophy to counter the accusation. Praising idleness sounds last century; instead, they...
The snapshots in my father’s book were taken during his first three years in London, after he emigrated from New Zealand with my mother. The picture shown here was taken at a Stepney street market....
Cellists and violinists in particular are haunted by the musicians who played their instruments before them and those who had taught these ancestors. Even new instruments bear the marks not only of their...
This show has excited controversy: should we even be talking about damage to antiquities in the context of so much killing? The show’s maps dating from earlier this year, however, make it clear that...
Highest 2 Lowest is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which is a loose adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom (1959). But Spike Lee turns it into a genuine scamper, where the...
Ruysch was a meticulous observer of nature, an artist whose insects seem real enough to buzz out of their frames. But her most innovative compositions have an unlikely aspect, a touch of the improbability...
Paintings – or perhaps, in the first instance, prints and reproductions – seem to have attracted Henry Clay Frick from a young age. When, in the early 1870s, he applied for a loan from a Pittsburgh...
John Singer Sargent was a certain kind of rootless American. Born in Italy, where he first learned to sketch and paint, he set foot in the US only at the age of twenty and spent most of his adult life...
At his best, Eno is a model of how to inhabit this role with verve and mischief; at other times you may wonder how exactly he went from playing Cornelius Cardew to producing Coldplay, and what had to be...
While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Parker is more astute than most on matters of style, the literary quality for which repetition is both most necessary and most risky. Doing...
Payne Knight’s greatest desire was that the British Museum would provide the public free access to an unrivalled resource for the study of antiquity and of art. His collection was, first and foremost,...