Articles

Manuel Rabaté is Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. He has taught Arts & Cultural Management at Paris-Dauphine University and Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi. He is a Knight of France’s National Order of Merit.   Dr Souraya Noujaim is Scientific, Curatorial & Collections Management Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi. She has studied the British Museum’s Arabic weights and measures, and has been Islamic Art History Chair at the École du Louvre.   Louvre Abu Dhabi sits at a tense but

A witness walking to these shores in our time would not spy a single war-worn and sea-tossed Ithacan sailor returning to his homeland but rather thousands of woeful, current- day avatars of Odysseus, refugees who in the words of Homer find themselves ‘τῆλε φίλων καὶ πατρίδος αἴης’, ‘far from friends and home’.   The linkage of space, politics, and the humanities in the theme of this conference is something more than a matter of mere historical timeliness—and certainly not opp

1. Introduction Music theory is white. —Philip Ewell Thus begins Philip Ewell’s article ‘Music Theory and the White Racial Frame’.[1] His...

Introduction   Webster’s Dictionary  defines culture as ‘the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and behaviour that depends on...

Fig 1. Returning (detail of SYNTERESE (Father Demosthenes Demosthenous 2020, mosaic)). Akropoli-Strovolos. Courtesy of Father Demosthenes...

The forging of a life in culture, economics, and security   My formative years were marked by my parents’ hopes and dreams that I would...

For far too long, Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades  (2004) has maintained its status as an Indian cinema cult classic. It is a film about a...

Mark Cazalet, born 1964, trained at the Chelsea and then Falmouth Schools of Art, after which he held scholarships in Paris and India. He works in a variety of media, including engraved glass, paint, prints, mosaics, and graphic media. He has taught in several art institutions and has been a Senior Member of Faculty at The Royal Drawing School since 2012. Travel has always played an important role in his art. Through the experience of his journeys, he has opened up rich collo

Every year a flower painting finds its way into my art. The Sunflowers  started with a creature I drew in charcoal straight onto the...

This paper examines contemporary Singaporean artist Marvin Tang’s project The Colony – Archive  (2019), a part of his ongoing research...

If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he...

One of Adolf Hitler’s favourite musicians was Richard Wagner. His thunderous compositions were meant to instil a violent pride within the...

Eliot’s work is filled—especially the poetry—with masks, role-playing, and multiple voices. Yet it is saturated everywhere, too, with...

Modern commerce takes place at supersonic speed. It therefore surprises many that most of the world’s traded goods are still, at some...

A statue tumbles and, with an almighty splash, sinks below the water. Those responsible cheer with joy. Onlookers are captured in a range of emotions: confusion, rage, wonder. What is taking place? Is this an anti-historical act of violent vandalism, or the liberating removal of a relic of the colonial era, an enduring reminder of oppression?   When Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of the merchant and slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020, it was

Axel Rü̈ger is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts. He is a former Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam...

Leonardo da Vinci is a constant of the Western cultural tradition. We grow up with a vague sense of Leonardo’s achievements, knowing him...

The will to transparency, the scopic drive to see through, to scrutinise naked truth, encounters a significant impediment in the dead letters, the literae mortuae , of law. The puppet show of juridical interpretation, the marionettes that are pulled as heavy signifiers, gothic black-letter dogmas from the pickle jar of precedent, perform a spectacle that is always a trope and costume, a stage and screen away from the viewing subject. As the pop philosopher and ‘narcotheorist’

Count Sperello di Serego Alighieri is an astronomer descended from Dante Alighieri, author of the  Divine Comedy .   Antoine de Gabrielli is a prominent French businessman descended from Cante dei Gabrielli, the judge who condemned Dante to exile.   Dante Alighieri lived from 1265 to 1321. During his lifetime, he was a pharmacist, a poet, and a politician. His study of medicines nourished an already scientific mind and allowed him to stock pharmacy shelves with his works. (Bo

Fig 1. Sacred and Profane Love (Titian 1514, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiziano_-_Amor_S...

Maggie Hoag is Deputy General Counsel, Americas, at the auction house Christie’s. She studied art law at Stanford, and was involved in...