Colin Raff proceeds into the biotic sculpture room

The Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto Bridge, Vittore Carpaccio, 1465 by Caspar Pearson This summer has seen English cities engulfed by the worst rioting since the early 1980s. Such was their ferocity that the riots quite eclipsed the troubles of News International, Anders...

Running the Numbers | by Stefany Anne Golberg

The Smart Set

In 1965, while waiting in a cafe, Roman Opalka decided to paint time. He didn’t paint the counters of time — clocks and watches and calendars and such. He didn’t paint...

Jane Avril at the Jardin de Paris, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893 From The Smart Set: In May of 1894, a young anarchist named Emile Henry travelled from his small apartment in Montmartre to the fashionable boulevards near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Unemployed and angry, he entered the elegant...

Four note chords by Dmitri Tymoczko Two hundred years ago, there were no CDs or MP3s and the primary way to preserve your music was to write it down. Not surprisingly, notated composition was a culturally central activity: Roughly 20,000 people are said to have attended Beethoven’s funeral, a non-negligible...

Lucinda Williams by Joe Linker “I am here, and there is nothing to say,” John Cage said, in his “Lecture on Nothing” (Silence, 1961). “If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment.” So we boarded Line 15, ancient music now turned...

From Guernica: It’s 1994, and Michael Stipe recently lost his religion. It’s before Bieber and bling, before ordering a latte required six qualifying adjectives. In coffeehouses across the country, bored teens slouch on thrift-store couches nodding along to the Cranberries’ “Zombie.” Weezer breaks into the alt-rock scene with the...

Thelma and Louise wrote their own version of emancipatory feminism...

Portrait of Arnold Schoenburg, Egon Schiele, 1917 by Sabine Feisst Arnold Schoenberg, the famous Viennese-born composer and pioneer of musical modernism, was one of the many refugees from Nazi tyranny who settled in the United States in the 1930s and never again set foot on European soil. Yet despite...