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Culture

Essays and videos on the arts, literature, travel, rituals and celebrations
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Design and fashion

Sitting on the art

Given its intimacy with the body and deep play on form and function, furniture is a ripely ambiguous artform of its own

Emma Crichton Miller

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Archaeology

Why make art in the dark?

New research transports us back to the shadowy firelight of ancient caves, imagining the minds and feelings of the artists

Izzy Wisher

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Music

The peculiar beauty of a song caught between composition and improvisation

3 minutes

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Art

‘If you’re creative, why can’t you create a solution?’ One artist’s imaginative activism

17 minutes

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Art

More than breathtaking, ‘The Birth of Venus’ signalled an aesthetic revolution

19 minutes

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Rituals and celebrations

The spectacular Mardi Gras artworks born of a unique New Orleans tradition

16 minutes

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Art

The overlooked polymath whose theatrical oeuvre made all of Rome a stage

30 minutes

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Art

The irreverent duo who thumbed their noses at the Soviet Union and the US art world

11 minutes

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Art

Why a forcefully phallic portrait of Henry VIII is a masterful work of propaganda

6 minutes

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Design and fashion

From spark of inspiration to final press – how William Blake built a book of poetry

8 minutes

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Animals and humans

An artist and ants collaborate on an exhibit of ‘tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings’

5 minutes

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Art

Inside the unique creative space where ‘outsider’ artists find their form

14 minutes

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Art

Why European artists shifted their focus from power to peasants in the 16th century

5 minutes

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Art

Negative capability

When it comes to our complicated, undecipherable feelings, art prompts a self-understanding far beyond the wellness industry

Aparna Chivukula

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Art

Earthly delights

Noticing first one then many parrots, peacocks, owls and more birds in Old Master paintings taught me to truly see the world

Leanne Ogasawara

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Art

From a pencil sketch to cherubs dancing in stone – recreating a Donatello work

7 minutes

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Art

All those naked Greeks…

Men in ancient Greek art exercise, fight battles, pursue lovers and mourn lost friends, all without their pants on. Why?

Sarah Murray

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Stories and literature

What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful?

10 minutes

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Dance and theatre

How a Noh mask-maker summons a lifelike face from a single block of wood

16 minutes

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Art

The art of rules

Conceptual art often confounds. The key is to understand the rules of the artwork and the aesthetic experiences they yield

Sherri Irvin

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Art

David Goldblatt captured the contradictions of apartheid in stark black and white

15 minutes

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Love and friendship

When drawing your muse hundreds of times becomes an exercise in love

7 minutes

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Art

Tracing Goya’s ‘dark’ journey from Spanish court painter to macabre visionary

51 minutes

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Future of technology

Artificial ‘creativity’ is unstoppable. Grappling with its ethics is up to us

23 minutes