In my horror and despair, in those first weeks, particularly when the systemic cruelty of the Russian military showed itself – not just towards civilians and the Ukrainian military, but towards its own...

Charles Lamb believed that books should be read, and that close reading could and should leave material traces. In an ironic piece on book-borrowers, he praised his friend Coleridge, who had returned...

For Bois, not only is form responsive to history, and historical situations inscribed in artistic transformations, but any such transformation is accountable to its present, and it is only thus that it...

A middle-aged man – Ha Sang-hyun, played by Song Kang-ho – looks tenderly at a baby and asks: ‘How could anyone throw him away?’ This has been interpreted as a sentimental moment in a sentimental...

The history of rebellion is always seductive. But the history of bone music suggests that state repression didn’t always loom as large in the lives of Soviet people as we might expect. What the stilyagi...

For some, it’s a genuine community: a safe haven of soothers and tingle-seekers, a tool for anxiety relief and relaxation, amateur in style but extremely lucrative for independent self-described ASMRtists....

Archer Huntington called these objects ‘specimens’ and, for all its treasures, his collection was a product of late Victorian ethnography that painted the Spanish as an essentially ‘oriental’ race....

The question of agency here is vexed and political (it’s also gendered). Does the authorship of Hilma af Klint’s spiritualist paintings lie with the medium or her spirit guides? And why do so many...

Drawing was never just drawing: Joseph Beuys was already thinking, it seems, in terms of an expanded notion of what art might be; a drawing might show nature, but also itself appear as a fragment of the...

At the interface of the orchestra and the audience the conductor is the recipient of two quite different waves of transference. At his back, an amorphous crowd of strangers beam expectation at him. They...

To find her guilty, the lawyer says, would be to decide that Laurence is a monster – ‘It is more convenient to see her as a monster’ – and such a decision would be a verdict but would not be justice...

The majority of women artists who exhibited at the Salon in the revolutionary period had never before shown their work in public. During the 1790s and early 1800s, several of them submitted self-portraits...

Ming Smith often compares herself to a blues or jazz musician. ‘If people could feel what I feel when I hear a Billie Holiday song,’ she says, ‘that’s what I would want them to feel when they look...

There is a tendency to linger on the physical vulnerability and discomfort evoked by Veronica Ryan’s pieces, part of a series called Infection which includes plaster casts of yellowing orthopaedic pillows,...

We’re increasingly comfortable with the idea of a book in virtual rather than physical form, but what happens when the content disappears too? Inevitably, we’re left looking at the frame around it....

At the height of his stardom, long before he became a salad dressing entrepreneur, Newman’s screen presence was more that of a living statue than an actor: a Greek god with a suntan and a side parting....

Cezanne’s private puzzling – just how should masses of lemon and lead white converse? – slips into provocative teasing. No, that plate on the right could hardly have perched in that way on a three-dimensional...

To think of Shakespeare’s plays as safe havens for displaced textual agents from different traditions is to understate the underlying violence of the dislocations they display. But to say that the passage...