This Magazine features literary insight and cultural commentary from our networks, and includes our coverage of the art market.
The unprecedented Academy award victory capped a perfect storm of French culture, Hollywood nostalgia and the “Napoleonic” tactics of U.S. producer Harvey Weinstein. The triumph of The Artist, the French black-and-white, almost completely silent film, is unprecedented — and almost sure to never be repeated. The success of Michel Hazanavicius’ film lies in…
Pablo Picasso “Nudes in a Forest,” Paris, spring 1908 watercolor, gouache and graphite on wove paper 47.6 x 59.1 cm (18 3/4 x 23 1/4 in.), Philadelphia Museum of Art / Courtesy of National Gallery of Art Pablo Picasso was the most inventive artist the West has ever known, and his drawings let us…
Notes to Self What art writing can learn from the lessons of literature Italo Calvino at his home in Paris (1984) I have always imagined that ‘creative’ writers confront the blank page accompanied by a coterie of kindred spirits – authors, fictional characters, fantastical creatures or historical figures – with whom they identify or against…
THE PIRELLI CALANDER Lara Stone The Pirelli calendar–otherwise known as the classiest pin-up girly calendar ever–is an annual tradition for those lucky few VIPs who find it in their mailboxes. It’s traditionally shot by world-renowned fashion photographers (Karl Lagerfeld last year, Mario Testino, Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, Terry Richardson…the list goes on and on) and features A-list…
Jester and Clown the TruthTellers with Wit. They expose the lies of human arrogance. Almost as many words have been written about Christopher Hitchens since he died as he would write in a typical working week. He was one of very, very few people on earth whom I would have missed just as much…
Relationship Between Artistic Success And Mating Success Your date lets it slip: “I’m an artist.” Do these words scream “code red” or “take me to bed”? According to some scientists, even human beings are just trying to make it in the animal kingdom, and everything we do can be…
In the Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction with his book The Sense of an Ending. In his boyhood in the 1950s, Tony Webster remembers, adolescence felt like a holding pen where the young were imprisoned for what seemed like eternity. Finally they were released into adulthood and…
Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives What Galileo has to do with the economy, or how Wall Street is molding your taste in art. “The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are how we make sense of the…