Arts News

We can go through most of our lives holding out hope of one day seeing in reality such works as van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Monet’s Haystacks, a clay tablet containing actual cuneiform writing with our own eyes, or the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur. We can actually come face to face — or rather, face to surface — with all

And now for something entirely random. As noted on Metafilter, “Peter Tork from the Monkees had a strange little quirk. Sometimes, when other actors … were delivering their lines Tork would unthinkingly mouth their dialogue along with them, as seen in this YouTube compilation. Once you spot it, it makes the show (which was already

During Wimbledon a few years ago, a thread about King Felipe VI of Spain went viral. It was posted to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter by Derek Guy, author of the menswear blog Die, Workwear! “Very rare to see this level of tailoring nowadays, even on the wealthy,” he commented on a

With the savage cuts in arts funding, perhaps we’ll return to a system of noblesse oblige familiar to students of The Gilded Age, when artists needed independent wealth or patronage, and wealthy industrialists often decided what was art, and what wasn’t. Unlike fine art, however, haute cuisine has always relied on the patronage of wealthy donors—or

Image by Walter Crist As far as enthusiasm for board games goes, no continent has yet outdone Europe. Its advantage could lie in the highly developed culture of low-cost leisure evident in quite a few of its societies; it could also owe to the fact that board games seem to have been played there continuously

“Good evening,” said Alfred Hitchcock to the television viewers of America on March 25, 1959. “Tonight I’m dining at my favorite club. There are many advantages here. As you can see, informality is the rule. There is also the stimulation of intellectual companionship without the deafening quiet that pervades most clubs. Best of all, I

The idea of the classical period—the time of ancient Greece and Rome—as an elegantly unified collection of superior aesthetic and philosophical cultural traits has its own history, one that comes in large part from the era of the Neoclassical. The rediscovery of antiquity took some time to reach the pitch it would during the 18th

You may not be able to name all, or even most, of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But you almost certainly know that there were seven of them. In a way, that aligns well enough with the worldview of the Greeks who first made reference to such a list, given their near-reverence for

Image by National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons Advice on how to grow old frequently comes from such banal or bloodless sources that we can be forgiven for ignoring it. Public health officials who dispense wisdom may have good intentions; pharmaceutical companies who do the same may not. In either case, the messages arrive in

Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Short Circuit, RoboCop, Ghost in the Shell, The Iron Giant, WALL‑E, Ex Machina: there is a parallel history of cinema to be told entirely through its robots. That such a history must begin with the work of Georges Méliès may not come as a surprise, given that