The shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, the most important pilgrimage destination in medieval England – visited for hundreds of years by pilgrims seeking miraculous healing – has been digitally reconstructed for the public, according to how experts believe it appeared before its destruction. In the 1530s, the Reformation in England saw the ornaments and riches...
Art & Style
How Hemingway Felt About Fatherhood
Ernest Hemingway was affectionately called “Papa,” but what kind of dad was he? In my role as Associate Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, I spend my time investigating the approximately 6,000 letters sent by Hemingway, 85% of which are now being published for the first time in a multivolume series. The latest volume –...
Coronavirus: How Artists in the Spanish-Speaking World Turn to Religious Imagery to Help Cope in a Crisis
While millions of people across Europe and beyond have been forced into lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, some artists have used their time in isolation to create work using religious imagery as a way to tell the story of the crisis. On the streets of Madrid, graffiti artist Ernesto Muñiz reimagined the imagery related to...
Study Reveals Secret of 18th-Century Portrait
Russian researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of RAS, and Russia’s famed Tretyakov Gallery have conducted a comprehensive preconservation study of “The Portrait of F.P. Makerovsky in a Masquerade Costume” (1789) by the Russian painter Dmitry Levitsky. The paper was published in the journal Heritage Science....
A Brief History of Invisibility on Screen
What would you do if you could be invisible? Would this newfound power bring out the best in you, instilling you with the courage to discreetly sabotage the efforts of evildoers? Or would the ability to slip in and out of rooms unnoticed tap into darker impulses? This alluring fantasy has long been fodder for...
How Art Helped Construct Afrikaner Nationalism in Apartheid South Africa
In this revised extract from the introduction to Troubling Images: Visual Culture and the Politics of Afrikaner Nationalism, the book’s editors assess how art and design helped forge Afrikaner nationalism. In Banal Nationalism British academic Michael Billig writes, “If the future remains uncertain, we know the past history of nationalism. And that should be sufficient...
Art for Our Time, Perez Art Museum Miami
Art and Soul: what does that mean? The expression has lent itself to many things in American society, such as a crafts studio in Long Island, a tattoo/piercing shop in the Hudson Valley of New York, and a gallery in Boulder, Colorado. Art and Soul echoes the expression heart and soul, which means without reservations...
The Queen of Spades: A Card, An Obsession, A Musical Spectacle
Many Americans are familiar with Italian, French and even German operas. Some prefer the ease of operas performed in English such as “Porgy and Bess,” but less familiar to audiences stateside are Russian operas. Thankfully, Tchaikovsky gave us eleven worthy operas; and while the most popular is arguably “Eugene Onegin,” his work “The Queen of...
Parasite: at Last the Oscars Jumps the ‘One-Inch’ Subtitles Barrier
Parasite may be the first foreign-language film to win a Oscar for best picture, but now that line has been crossed, there’s every hope this might mark a shift in attitudes to what the film’s director Bong Joon-ho calls the “one inch tall barrier of subtitles”. A lot has been said recently about diversity and...
What Is the Place of the Performing Arts Fair in the Age of the Internet?
Review: Platform Papers 62: Performing Arts Markets and their Conundrums, by Justin Macdonnell (Currency Press) The performing arts may be a public good that serve to enrich Australia’s cultural imagination, but they are also a product competing for audience share and government, corporate and private support. Established in 1994, the Australian Performing Arts Market (APAM)...