Culture

The peculiar beauty of a song caught between composition and improvisation

3 minutes

‘If you’re creative, why can’t you create a solution?’ One artist’s imaginative activism

17 minutes

More than breathtaking, ‘The Birth of Venus’ signalled an aesthetic revolution

19 minutes

The spectacular Mardi Gras artworks born of a unique New Orleans tradition

16 minutes

The overlooked polymath whose theatrical oeuvre made all of Rome a stage

30 minutes

The irreverent duo who thumbed their noses at the Soviet Union and the US art world

11 minutes

Why a forcefully phallic portrait of Henry VIII is a masterful work of propaganda

6 minutes

From spark of inspiration to final press – how William Blake built a book of poetry

8 minutes

Inside the unique creative space where ‘outsider’ artists find their form

14 minutes

Why European artists shifted their focus from power to peasants in the 16th century

5 minutes

Negative capability

When it comes to our complicated, undecipherable feelings, art prompts a self-understanding far beyond the wellness industry

Aparna Chivukula

Earthly delights

Noticing first one then many parrots, peacocks, owls and more birds in Old Master paintings taught me to truly see the world

Leanne Ogasawara

From a pencil sketch to cherubs dancing in stone – recreating a Donatello work

7 minutes

All those naked Greeks…

Men in ancient Greek art exercise, fight battles, pursue lovers and mourn lost friends, all without their pants on. Why?

Sarah Murray

What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful?

10 minutes

How a Noh mask-maker summons a lifelike face from a single block of wood

16 minutes

The art of rules

Conceptual art often confounds. The key is to understand the rules of the artwork and the aesthetic experiences they yield

Sherri Irvin

David Goldblatt captured the contradictions of apartheid in stark black and white

15 minutes

Tracing Goya’s ‘dark’ journey from Spanish court painter to macabre visionary

51 minutes

Milk, pity and power

Since antiquity, artists have depicted a perverse scene of a daughter breastfeeding her aged father. What does it mean?

Margie Orford