Fassbinder predicted a world of ubiquitous screens. He was flamboyantly gay, proudly ugly, extremely left-wing, outrageously productive and had an astonishing eye. It’s easy to imagine him, if he’d...
Unlike Kathryn Scanlan’s short stories, which dispense with context and explication, Kick the Latch is precisely detailed. Her character, Sonia, describes the importance of X-raying horses’ hooves...
Fashions change, but monarchical regalia tends towards ossification: Charles III and Camilla left their coronation this year swathed in robes of ermine-trimmed purple, just as George III and his queen...
The story of artists’ studios intersects with the history of real estate, just as it shadows the expansion of other ‘curated’ spaces in late capitalism. Today hairdressers, potters, nail technicians,...
Research into intellectual auxiliaries has thrived in recent years. Translators, interpreters, secretaries and amanuenses are no longer considered intermediaries, but contributors in their own right. Martin...
The idea that an ordinary person can be elevated by riches, transformed by holidays and furs, is more plausible to many than transformation through work or taxation. In Lotto Britain, the Good Life is...
Could pottery be art? Should a teapot pour? Lucie Rie had no truck with this. When asked about theoretical or critical questions she would answer with crisp finality: ‘I make pots. It is my profession.’
As Mia Hansen-Løve’s style and interests suggest, any narrative solution is one option among several. That is the force of the other meaning of the film’s title: not hoping against hope, or believing...
California’s first gold rush was in 1848; its second was Hollywood. Between 1910 and 1925, film industry grosses went from $10 million to $800 million. There were jobs and spondulix galore. Hollywood...
Mária Bartuszová made around five hundred sculptures, her productivity aided by her preferred material, plaster. The great majority of her works are plaster casts – and not just any sort. Plaster has...
The story South Korea likes to tell about itself is ‘The Miracle on the Han River’, in which a country rises from the ashes of war and dictatorship to become a stylish economic success story. The story...
Positioned higgledy-piggledy in London streets, a battery of defunct cannons threatens to destroy ordinary people’s homes and livelihoods, day-to-day infrastructure and basic amenities, art and nature,...
French moralists are not usually moralisers. They explore moral ground by turning its difficulties into aphorisms. They are because they think; they are frightened by the eternal silence of...
Donatello was driven to devise original solutions by the success of the older Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose mastery of linear perspective in relief sculpture could never be surpassed. But there can be little...
I wonder how we got here. How is it that Vermeer’s paintings now strut the world stage, having skulked for two centuries in the wings? And I wonder where Vermeer himself thought he was heading. What...
Fans make no pretence of balance or reason. They are drunk on irrationality and obstinacy, hurling themselves after the fortunes of their chosen team, band, TV show or celebrity. A fan may feel aggrieved...
What exactly Jim Ede was eludes classification. He was a collector, up to a point, though he never had much money; a patron, but only in a small way; an aspiring artist who never made a career of it; a...
Wild Isles doesn’t explicitly advocate for returning the water companies to public ownership (a policy backed by 69 per cent of the population but by neither of the leading political parties). But it...