Richard Mosse seeks what can’t be seen. He employs military or industrial camera technologies sensitive to light spectra invisible to the eye; his subjects are ignored or remote catastrophes.
For Richter, the seeming inevitability of capitalism only made it a better subject. He has never been an artist who asks questions of the world around him; he paints not from life but from photographs,...
In the middle of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a character makes a horrible discovery about reality: it keeps changing. This may seem obvious and is only part of the truth anyway. One of reality’s other...
St Francis wrote poetry, tamed a wolf, received the stigmata on a mountainside, and if you love a kitsch Nativity figurine, you have St Francis to thank. He was a poor scribe and a worse artist, but great...
Drag Race is a sisterhood, and a masterpiece of queer capitalism. RuPaul, a preppy businessman by day, is a figure of superlative glamour in drag – a Black woman comparable in beauty to Naomi Campbell,...
Ernest Cole’s politics were opaque, he didn’t give much away, but his photographs suggest that he saw racism as a more decisive force in South Africa than the structural injustices of capitalism, even...
The suggestion, I think, is that life as we live it may be largely an affair of props and sets, and Wes Anderson is inviting us not to feel too bad about this possibility. The question ‘Who framed Asteroid...
The vogue in the 1930s and 1940s for unknown, native and ‘primitive’ art means that Morris Hirshfield is remembered (when he is remembered) as an unworldly Jewish tailor who one day decided to pick...
Richard Ford’s Frank might be more low-key than other sequential protagonists in modern American fiction – Nathan Zuckerman, Harry Angstrom, Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton – and at the end of Be Mine...
Damaged, unfinished or fragmented works have an appeal of their own (Renaissance artists sometimes deliberately sought this ‘non finito’) and are also prized for what they can teach us about an artist’s...
For the past 25 years, Kamila Shamsie has been working on a vast scale. There's a thrill that comes with the grand sweep, the comparison between Western imperialist projects, but Shamsie writes best about...
Coward absorbed many of the ideals of the lower-middle-class Edwardian England in which he grew up and never repudiated them. Patriotic, enthusiastic about the Empire, mistrustful of intellectualism and...
Fassbinder predicted a world of ubiquitous screens. He was flamboyantly gay, proudly ugly, extremely left-wing, outrageously productive and had an astonishing eye. It’s easy to imagine him, if he’d...
Unlike Kathryn Scanlan’s short stories, which dispense with context and explication, Kick the Latch is precisely detailed. Her character, Sonia, describes the importance of X-raying horses’ hooves...
Fashions change, but monarchical regalia tends towards ossification: Charles III and Camilla left their coronation this year swathed in robes of ermine-trimmed purple, just as George III and his queen...
The story of artists’ studios intersects with the history of real estate, just as it shadows the expansion of other ‘curated’ spaces in late capitalism. Today hairdressers, potters, nail technicians,...
Research into intellectual auxiliaries has thrived in recent years. Translators, interpreters, secretaries and amanuenses are no longer considered intermediaries, but contributors in their own right. Martin...
The idea that an ordinary person can be elevated by riches, transformed by holidays and furs, is more plausible to many than transformation through work or taxation. In Lotto Britain, the Good Life is...