Philosophy
video
Music
‘Dun dun dun duuun!’ Why Beethoven’s Fifth sticks in the head and stirs the heart
5 minutes
essay
Film and visual culture
The truth of photographs
It’s often said that a successful picture ‘captures the essence’ of a subject. But a great photograph does so much more
Daniel Star
video
Art
Inside the unique creative space where ‘outsider’ artists find their form
14 minutes
video
Stories and literature
What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful?
10 minutes
essay
Politics and government
Models of antiquity
Radicals in the Age of Revolution saw the classical world as a common inheritance that could aid their fight for liberty
Francesca Langer
essay
Art
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
essay
Stories and literature
The sonnet machine
A sonnet contains an emotional drama of illusion and deception, crisis and resolution, crafted to make us think and feel
Timothy Hampton
video
Love and friendship
When drawing your muse hundreds of times becomes an exercise in love
7 minutes
essay
Beauty and aesthetics
Patterns of the lifeworld
Machine learning theory is shedding new light on how to think about the mysterious and ineffable nature of art
Peli Grietzer
video
Art
Tracing Goya’s ‘dark’ journey from Spanish court painter to macabre visionary
51 minutes
essay
Animals and humans
Where went the wolf?
The very attributes that make small dogs cute and popular are slowly strangling their ability to function as real animals
Jessica Pierce
video
Architecture
The radically impractical 18th-century architect whose ideas on beauty endure
19 minutes
video
Chemistry
A square inch in a Petri dish becomes a grand stage for chemical transformations
4 minutes
essay
History of ideas
The first Romantics
How a close group of brilliant friends, in a tiny German university town, laid the foundations of modern consciousness
Andrea Wulf
essay
Beauty and aesthetics
Attuned to the aesthetic
The ultimate value of the world can be discovered if you are sensitive to what is beautiful
Tom Cochrane
video
Evolution
Symmetry rules life on Earth – but it comes with many fascinating exceptions
9 minutes
essay
Beauty and aesthetics
What does art do?
Good art, laced with irony, ambiguity and suspense, is not obviously political. That’s what makes it politically interesting
Vid Simoniti
video
Ageing and death
‘It’s not beautiful, but it’s interesting’ – an ageing nude model surveys her body
4 minutes
video
Art
Can art in a swanky restaurant ever be transcendent? On Rothko’s Seagram Murals
15 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
At the movies with Pauline Kael – in the arthouse cinema where she got her start
19 minutes
video
Archaeology
Ancient Greek sculptures were colourful. Why does the white marble ideal persist?
6 minutes
video
Art
Dizzying discs and obscene wordplay – revisiting Marcel Duchamp’s 1926 film debut
7 minutes
video
Architecture
Why a sculptor pivoted from gallery installations to big-box stores design
9 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
For Ruskin, words couldn’t capture nature’s palette. So here it is in black and white
6 minutes