Articles

Between December 1949 and February 1950, three shipments, carrying a total of 3,824 crates of artefacts and artworks from the Qing...

Many significant cultural objects have found uncomfortable homes in museums across the world.[1] They have been trapped behind glass,...

What is it that makes you tremble?’[1] Jacques Derrida poses this question to discuss the vulnerability that we fear. We see...

Introduction   Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled prediction algorithms create multiple challenges to existing ideas about human agency and how the results of this agency may be governed. Weak or absent transparency in the operation of computational systems is changing the meaning of individual autonomy as AI enables vast numbers of new capabilities previously designed and implemented by humans.[1] The prevailing wisdom is that AI innovation is best driven by commercial mar

Becky Shaw is a Senior Associate at Boodle Hatfield in the firm’s art law and commercial litigation teams. She has worked on cases...

Abstract   In the wake of successive disappointing election performances by the UK Labour Party, commentators on the party’s centre-right...

This is the text of the Introductory Address read at the conference on temporary exhibitions held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen on...

Abstract Expressionism emerged amid a tense post-war climate, as a new genre of art that seemed so devoid of representational form or meaning that it could not be political. However, it was precisely this apparent apoliticality that made it so intensely political. Historiography on the topic has followed what I am inclined to call a ‘top-down’ trend. As outlined by Eva Cockcroft and Frances Stonor Saunders, those in power consciously used the art of the Abstract Expressionist

Anthony Julius is a solicitor advocate who has represented Princess Diana and Deborah Lipstadt. He is Deputy Chairman of Mishcon de Reya,...

Born in Portsmouth in 1951, Sir Christopher Le Brun is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. As President of the Royal Academy 2011-19, he...

Postcards have long been linked to memory formation, sold primarily as ‘souvenirs’, a term itself deriving from the French verb souvenir...

In the digital age, the sharing of images is prevalent across a variety of online platforms. Instagram, one of the largest of these, can provide an up-and-coming artist with an audience of over one billion users. Some already predict the platform’s decline. Kenny Schachter recently commented that, given Instagram’s ever-changing format, ‘it is only a matter of time before the powers that be get too greedy and the ease and accessibility of the app decline’.[1] Yet platforms li

Introduction   Frans Hals was a mildly successful seventeenth-century Dutch old master who specialised in portraits. Few of his works have persisted in popular cultural consciousness in the intervening 400 years. One exception is the Laughing Cavalier,  painted in 1624, which remains on display in the Wallace Collection in London. The Laughing Cavalier  was once described by the Harvard art historian   Seymour Slive as ‘one of the most brilliant of all Baroque portraits’.[1]

One of the problems of having lived a long life is that it brings home to one the many different identities one has occupied in the...

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) was set up in 1948 following the 1942 Beveridge report, a cross-party report which established its...

Russell Barnes is a Director and Producer for the documentary production company ClearStory. Clare Burns has worked in television...

What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death? It means work. It is work: hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living. —Christina Sharpe[1]   A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues: the statue o

The application of print privilege (pre-copyright) legislation to Venetian cartography came about by chance.[1] While the Venetian Republic was not the first state in Europe to construct a system of printing privileges, it was the earliest to grant limited monopolies for cartography and artwork. Intended originally for bestowing printed book privileges, the wording of the sixteenth century legislation and printing culture of Early Modern Venice enabled the expansion of the pr