Arts News

Everyone in ancient Rome wore togas, surrounded themselves with pure-white marble statues, bayed for blood as gladiators fought to the death in the Colosseum, programmatically imitated the Greeks, and, after each and every debaucherous feast, excused themselves to the vomitoria, where they ritually vacated their stomachs. Or at least that’s the picture any of us

Even today, the Paris of the popular imagination is, for the most part, the Paris envisioned by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann and made a reality in the eighteen-fifties and sixties. Not that he could order the city built whole: as explained by Manuel Bravo in the new video above, Paris had already existed for about two

Image by Jules Jacot Guillarmod, via Wikimedia Commons In 2016, we brought you a rather strange story about the rivalry between poet William Butler Yeats and magician Aleister Crowley. Theirs was a feud over the practices of occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; but it was also—at least for Crowley—over poetry. Crowley

Each of us has a different idea of when, exactly, the sixties ended, not as a decade, but as a distinct cultural period. Some have a notion of the “long sixties” that extends well into the seventies; if pressed for a specific final year, they could do worse than pointing to 1972, when David Bowie

You’ve likely heard the reason people never smile in very old photographs. Early photography could be an excruciatingly slow process. With exposure times of up to 15 minutes, portrait subjects found it impossible to hold a grin, which could easily slip into a pained grimace and ruin the picture. A few minutes represented a marked

It may well be that the major pivot points of history are only visible to those around the bend. For those of us immersed in the present—for all of its deafening sirens of violent upheaval—the exact years future generations will use to mark our epoch remain unclear. But when we look back, certain years stand out above all

You could argue that, of all rock bands, that Pink Floyd had the least need for visual accompaniment. Sonically rich and evocatively structured, their albums evolved to offer listening experiences that verge on the cinematic in themselves. Yet from fairly early in the Floyd’s history, their artistic ambitions extended to that which could not be

As many as a million people crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on foot to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its construction in 1987. More than a few of them would have remembered San Francisco as it was before it had its most iconic structure — and indeed, some would even remember walking across it once

In addition to the iconic scene in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, or appearances in animated TV shows and video games, M.C. Escher’s work has adorned the covers of albums like Mott the Hoople’s 1969 debut and the speculative fiction of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. A big hit with hippies and 1960s college students, writes

From Red Bull’s YouTube Channel: “Ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel becomes the first person to climb Mount Everest and ski back to Everest Base Camp without supplementary oxygen. After nearly 16 hours climbing in the high altitude “death zone” (above 8,000m where oxygen levels are dangerously low), Bargiel clipped into his skis on the summit of