Add this topic to your myFT Digest for news straight to your inbox
‘The mix of devout and homely is what popular art does: think of samplers stitched with homilies’
Laurence Scott on a ‘comedy of emotional errors’ between humans and humanoids
‘Oasis’s bravado and conspicuous consumption seemed only natural in a booming economy’
‘China brings authenticity up close and personal. How do you read objects where authorship is so dispersed?’
‘If you put anything, even a mango or a tin can, into a frame, a box, a vitrine, you make it special’
‘For much of the 20th century, altruism was usually taken to be a form of selfishness in disguise’
‘The purpose of online courses is efficient learning. As such they leave little room for the humanities professor’
‘What director would not want to go to Arizona, dress the actors in costumes and have them roll in the dust?’
‘Longevity theorists since Aristotle have been tempted to fiddle with gonads, to no good effect’
‘Generalising on the basis of meagre empirical evidence is what, in one sense, all writers do and must do’
‘Included in the 39p a day we pay for the BBC are more than a dozen radio channels of high quality’
‘When have moviemakers ever been deferential to the intentions and efforts of literature?’
‘There’s a foreshadowing here of a later transatlantic connection that British beat groups made with the blues’
‘I don’t suppose Bacon thought his utopia would be built. But he had pretty much described Google HQ’
Does it somehow threaten the rest of us if highly talented people are allowed to thrive and prosper?
The temptation for art is to grow more unctuous in order to appease these uppity audiences
‘As a Jew, it is difficult to ask for your money back. Even if it is rightfully yours — and stolen with intense violence’
‘For people such as Rachel Dolezal, existential horror resides in vivid definition in a Google search’
‘I can’t shake the feeling that gender-based special pleading implies weakness’
‘The beautiful words in this anthology don’t excuse their actions, but they are their words’
During the Arab uprisings and afterwards, Camus was somehow planted among the crowds
‘In this era of resurgent nationalist violence, encyclopedic museums are more important than ever’
‘The art scene’s Three Graces of Access, Diversity and Outreach are oblivious to the lurking figure of Elitism’
‘I saw, literally in a new light, work I’ve never much rated: a Georgia O’Keeffe, a Lichtenstein, an Eva Hesse’
Most people I meet cannot quite believe that there is a general election campaign under way at all
International Edition