News
Did This 19th-Century Painting Inspire Taylor Swift’s New Album Art?
The dramatic teal green cover for the singer’s forthcoming The Life of A Showgirl is an apparent wink to John Everett Millais’s famous “Ophelia.”
John Everett Millais
Art
What’s So Hard About Painting Shakespeare?
Many paintings of Shakespearean scenes feel mawkish or literal-minded, flat-footed or lacking in emotional depth.
Test 2018 posts
Hieronymus Bosch and Ophelia Drowning Get a Gucci Remix
Gucci has also installed mannequins that lifelessly watch video versions of appropriated art.
Art
The Grisly and Heroic Propaganda of the Doomed Franklin Expedition
This month, the infamously ill-fated Franklin Expedition returned to the headlines with the discovery of the missing HMS Terror.
Books
The Mouse, an Unexpected and Enduring Art Muse
As one of the most common mammals on our planet, the diminutive mouse has been scurrying its way into art for centuries. The rodent has now finally received its own art compendium with Lorna Owen's Mouse Muse: The Mouse in Art, out next week from Monacelli Press.
Opinion
Bad Art Definitely Bad, Science Confirms
A study in the latest edition of the British Journal of Aesthetics portends to determine whether aesthetics are assessed through exposure, as held in a widely cited prior work of research, or if there's a discernibly innate common component to human judgments of visual value.
Art
Pre-Raphaelites With Guns
When Italian revolutionaries made an assassination attempt on Napoleon III in 1858, and it turned out that they'd been refugees in Great Britain, the British looked at their outnumbered army and rightly wondered if they should beef up their forces in comparison to the enraged French. One of these vo
Art
Shock of the Old: The Pre-Raphaelites Go Back to the Future
In its first iteration in London, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, the survey now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, bore the edgier title Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. We may not customarily think of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) — founded in secret