Culture

Culture

Tuesday

Jonathan Keeperman

Is there such a thing as right-wing art?

This has been adapted from a speech titled “The Myth-Maker as Nation-Builder,” which was delivered by Jonathan Keeperman, who runs publishing house Passage Press, at the National Conservatism Conference 2025. As W.B. Yeats once said: “There is no great literature without nationality. There is no great nationality without literature.” People often ask me whether it is possible to produce right-wing art, or otherwise to use art to engineer a more nationalist politics. But this strikes me as backward thinking. Culture is the field in which a people encounters the shared symbols and language that make political life possible. Art, done well, discloses the deeper truths a people already carry within themselves. Art therefore does not produce the nation; it reveals the nation.

Truth
Mario Naves

Reconciling dreams with reality

Should you be waiting in line at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the exhibition Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, don’t be put off by “Tête” (1974), a sculpture by Joan Miró that is big and ugly and plopped down directly at the entrance. Be aware that Miró’s true métier was painting; “Tête” was cranked out long past his prime. You can’t blame an old man for cashing in on his reputation, particularly when his formative years were burdened by poverty. You can blame a curator for including a flagrant piece of product as a how-do-you-do to a centennial celebration.

Surrealism
Leann Davis Alspaugh

The contingent talent of Emily Sargent

When your brother is one of the most successful artists of his time, you might feel reluctant to pick up a paintbrush. Yet, the works of Emily Sargent, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Portrait of a Family, prove that she was an artist in her own right. Sargent (1857-1936) was not in her brother’s shadow, although she was undoubtedly in his debt. John, Emily and their sister Violet were the children of FitzWilliam Sargent, a successful Philadelphia physician, and the artist Mary Newbold Sargent. By the 1850s, the Sargent family were living a nomadic existence in Europe – John and Emily were both born in Florence. Encouraged by their spirited mother, the Sargent children were instructed that no matter how many sketches were begun in a day, at least one must be finished.

Monet
Diane Cole

Monet’s Venetian moment

If you crave art that will envelop you, book a ticket, pronto, to Monet and Venice at the Brooklyn Museum. Enveloppe was the term the French impressionist artist Claude Monet (1840-1926) used to describe the “beauty of the air around” the objects and landscapes he painted. “Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat… I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house, and the boat are to be found – the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible,” he said.

train dreams
Veronica Clarke

Portrait of a frontier life

Death falls from the sky in Denis Johnson’s 116-page novella Train Dreams (2011) in the form of “widowmakers,” broken tree limbs that can strike heedless loggers. Death burns through forests and arrests the heart of a young man hauling sacks of cornmeal; it rots through the wounded leg of a pedophile; it takes Robert Grainier in his sleep in November of 1968: “He lay dead in his cabin through the rest of the fall, and through the winter, and was never missed.” But Train Dreams, often hailed as a “miniature masterpiece,” is not a story of defeat: it is an elegiac love letter to the unobserved life of the American frontier worker who, though left behind by the steady march of progress, endures with quiet grace.

Monday

Daniel Johnson

Tom Stoppard was himself to the end

"Tom Stoppard is dead." For anyone who cares for the theater, the English language, and especially for those of us who knew him, these words are as unthinkable as they are hard to bear. How can such a force of nature, such a generosity of spirit, such a voice of sanity, have fallen silent? And yet he has gone. To the end, his body emaciated by cancer, he was still the old Tom: self-deprecating but full of ideas and plans. He might have one more play inside him, he told me, but his fingers could no longer physically write and dictation somehow stopped the words from flowing. He was cared for by his magnificent wife Sabrina, who entertained us tirelessly.

Wednesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump blames Biden for shooting of National Guardsmen

In response to the attack on Thanksgiving eve by a suspected Afghan national upon two West Virginia National Guardsmen, President Trump demanded a renewed effort to expel illegal immigrants. During a brief and uncompromising address from West Palm Beach that bore the rhetorical fingerprints of White House advisor Stephen Miller, Trump ripped into illegal immigration and former president Joe Biden. The President deemed the influx of refugees from Afghanistan and elsewhere the “single greatest national-security threats” facing America. Biden was a “disastrous president.” Trump reserved special scorn for his detractors who he said purport to protect constitutional liberties but are leaving America exposed to rampant criminality.

Alexander Larman

When will the Beatles bandwagon end?

The Beatles broke up in 1970, but you wouldn’t know it from the activity of the last few years. In no particular order, we have had an underwhelming valedictory single, “Now and Then,” raised from the dead thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence and Peter Jackson alike; an eight-hour – eight!– documentary, Get Back, resurrected from the footage of the Let It Be sessions; and now, an all-singing, all-dancing reissue on Disney+ of the Nineties Anthology documentary series, which has been promoted with the fourth volume of offcuts and rare tracks from the band’s career, appropriately titled Anthology 4.

Tuesday

Nicholas Clairmont

They should never make another James Bond film

The 25th and most recent entry in the James Bond franchise, No Time to Die, premiered over four years ago. Since then, there has nonetheless been Bond drama. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, and with it the rights to 007. But it took several more years to wrest producer control from Eon productions, run by the Broccoli family’s Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, scions of the filmic spy empire created by their father Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. (The family claims that the vegetable is named after them, their fortune having been founded by crossing rabe with cauliflower.) Most recently, writers for the long-delayed upcoming 26th Bond film, set to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, appear to be stumped, plotwise.

Wednesday

Germán Saucedo

Give Stellan Skarsgård an Oscar for Sentimental Value

Recently, a friend of mine found himself having a bad day for a reason I now forget. I made a lousy attempt to cheer him up. “Omnia in bonum,” I said to him – all things work together for good. The Latin phrase has served as a salve for me in hard times. Little did I know that I had just made things much worse. He was visibly shaken. I asked him what was wrong. I had unknowingly stirred memories of his parents’ difficult and traumatizing divorce, during which that same phrase had been used by them in a pointless attempt to assuage their children’s sadness. The idea that a phrase, a memory or an object can be simultaneously cursed for one person and blessed for another had never occurred to me. It has occurred to the Finnish filmmaker Joachim Trier.

Tuesday

Neal Pollack

Nicki Minaj and Mike Waltz team up at the UN

Before Nicki Minaj spoke at the United Nations today, Ambassador Mike Waltz referred to her as “the greatest female recording artist” and a “principled individual who refuses to remain silent in the face of injustice.” Adele, Beyoncé, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Barbra Streisand and many others would like to have a word with Ambassador Waltz (I hear he’s on Signal). But unlike Minaj, none of them appeared at the UN to speak out against the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.   “Ambassador,” Minaj wrote on X, “I am so grateful to be entrusted with an opportunity of this magnitude. I do not take it for granted. It means more than you know. The Barbz & I will never stand down in the face of injustice.

nicki minaj mike waltz
Jonathan Petropoulos

South America is flush with Nazi-looted art

This summer, a niche story from the art world caught fire: an Old Master painting, stolen by the Nazis from a Dutch-Jewish art dealer, surfaced in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Remarkably, journalists from a Dutch newspaper spotted it on the wall of a house in a promotional photo that was part of a “for sale” real-estate listing. It turned out that one of the sellers of the house was the daughter of a Nazi official who worked for Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, a notorious art plunderer. When the stolen painting was recognized, the daughter allegedly removed it from the wall, replacing it with another artwork – a tapestry. Argentine authorities then arrested her and her husband and charged them with concealing a crime.

nazi
Mario Naves

Rauschenberg is a bore

Pity the security guard at the Guggenheim who must patrol the gallery in which Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped is installed. Mounted in commemoration of the artist’s centennial – Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in October 1925 – Life Can’t Be Stopped includes “Revolver II” (1967), a set of plexiglass discs with images overlaid. A cord leads from the back of this contraption to a pedestal on which there is a control panel – a set of buttons placed in proximity to the viewer. These switches set the plexiglass discs in motion, and they beg to be pushed. On my trip to the museum, visitor after visitor was shushed away from “Revolver II” with the age-old plaint: “Please don’t touch the art.

man ray
Suzanna Murawski

Man Ray is alluring in the way a psychopath is

Down to his chosen name, Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890) worked hard to squash anything about him you might call human. At least that’s what is suggested by the Met’s exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream. The show spans much of his career – he was associated with surrealism and dada, held a day job as a commercial photographer and experimented with almost every medium imaginable – but coheres around his so-called rayographs, also known, in less egotistical fashion, as photograms. Many will know this medium from elementary school: place objects on top of a light-sensitive sheet and expose them to light to yield white silhouettes against a dark background.

scorsese
Alexander Larman

Is Martin Scorsese America’s greatest living director?

Who’s the greatest living American film director? Many would say Steven Spielberg, and that can’t be dismissed, but he hasn’t made a really good film since Munich (2005). There are many younger pretenders – such as David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino – and the more esoterically inclined might make the case for anyone from Terrence Malick to Spike Lee. Yet it’s hard not to feel that the don of contemporary American cinema is Martin Scorsese, whose career over the past five-and-a-half decades has existed, sans pareil, thanks to a vast dollop of talent, a considerable degree of good fortune and, crucially, an ability to lure both A-list collaborators and deep-pocketed moneymen into financing his films.

phantom
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

A new Phantom comes to Broadway

Around midway through Masquerade – the new immersive adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, which sees a small audience whirled through a labyrinth of rooms and sets – I feel a hand on my shoulder. Smiling, I turn, expecting to see my friend – and immediately recoil. A tiny circus freak grins at me, revealing teeth like sharpened screwdrivers and a painted face lifted straight from Día de los Muertos. Later, in a carnival scene, that same freak hammers three nails into her face and an ice-pick up her nose. The carnival sequence is not in the original Phantom. It is one of the largest and perhaps most important of Masquerade’s additions.

Gavin Mortimer

Did the Louvre robbers want to get caught?

It is more than a month since thieves stole the crown jewels from the Louvre and the chances of recovering the loot, worth an estimated €88 million, diminish with every passing day. The robbery was initially dubbed the “heist of the century,” a brazen theft in broad daylight as visitors strolled through the world’s most famous museum. There were up and down the ladder and in out of the museum in seven minutes, giving the impression that this was the work of villains well-versed in daring robberies. But soon details emerged that suggested the gang of four weren’t quite of the caliber of the thieves immortalized in the Hollywood movie Ocean’s Eleven.

Thursday

Britt McHenry

Will Disney strike a deal to end its YouTube TV blackout?

A war has taken over media coverage. No, not one of actual consequence. This war, however, is imminently affecting your national pastime and your wallet. This is a civil war within media. The combatants are the Walt Disney Company with it’s channels – including ABC and ESPN, plus the SEC and ACC networks – and Google, YouTube TV’s parent company. The two entities failed to meet a carrier agreement, and all Disney channels are blacked out on YouTube TV. That means that much of the nation will not have access to most of the weekend’s football content, as has been the case since the showdown a couple weeks ago.

youtube tv disney

Sunday

Alexander Larman

On less famous presidential assassins

Everyone can name JFK and his (probable) assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, or Abraham Lincoln and everyone’s least favorite actor, John Wilkes Booth. But what of James A.  Garfield, America’s short-lived (in both senses) 20th President, and his murderer, Charles Guiteau? Both men have disappeared into obscurity, at least until Candice Millard’s award-winning 2011 true-crime history Destiny of the Republic, which skillfully unpicked the sheer strangeness of the backstory behind Garfield’s protracted death and Guiteau’s conviction and execution for the crime. Garfield won election in the 1880 presidential election almost by accident.

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

Why do white men’s feelings matter more than black lesbians’?

So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offense? She dared to complain about the presence of a person with a penis – what we used to call a bloke – in the women’s changing room. Ms. Hyman is a lesbian and a singer originally from the Bronx in New York. She says she encountered a man who identifies as a woman in the changing area of the gym she uses in LA. She was shaken. "I was naked in the locker room," she said. "I turn around and there’s a man there in boy clothes, lip gloss, standing there looking at me. I’m butt naked.

trans lesbians
Alexander Larman

Uncovering Brian Wilson’s real genius

The death earlier this year of Brian Wilson, aged 82, was marked by the usual tributes to a man who was not only a pioneer of popular music, but also a sadly troubled genius whose early years of wild success were quickly overtaken by decades of drug addiction and mental health problems. A recurring theme in the obituaries was what might have happened in the aftermath of the Beach Boys’ masterpiece, 1966’s Pet Sounds, if Wilson, by then the band’s producer and lead songwriter, had not descended almost immediately into narcotic-induced torpor. It has commonly been suggested that Paul McCartney – who revered Wilson – was also jealous of the achievement of Pet Sounds, which arguably overshadowed the Beatles’ Revolver, and that Sgt.

sixties surreal
Zachary Ginsberg

Sixties Surreal at the Whitney is a bad trip

The Whitney’s Sixties Surreal is not about Surrealism. I spent about a week trying to figure out what it might actually be about, before I gave up. The show claims to seek to answer a simple question: what if Surrealism, rather than Cubism, had been the dominant thread in modern American art? This is funny to me, as Dalí’s melting clocks are far better known in America than any Cubist painting. Regardless, the museum never provides an answer. Instead, the Whitney jumps right to its agenda: reviving what it deems an overlooked thread of countercultural art. Ah, yes, the woefully neglected subject of… counterculture in the 1960s.

met kinky
Jane Coombs

Why is the Met making medieval art perverse?

Unwitting historians often reveal just as much – if not more – about their own time and place than the time and place they claim to describe. The curators of Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages, a new exhibition at the Met Cloisters, are prime examples. Gathering manuscript illustrations, paintings, sculptures, jewelry and more from the 13th to 16th centuries, the exhibition promises to uncover “the hidden sexuality and sensuality of medieval art.” The intent is “queering the past,” and the objects were chosen to show expressions of “desire” in as many forms as possible – a saucy premise that appeals to contemporary trends. But many of the new interpretations range from the woolly to the laughable.

tron ares
Peter Tonguette

Drowning in the neon swamp of Tron: Ares

Sitting in the nearly empty movie theater at which I saw Tron: Ares, I found myself swamped by neon. Its hues are unappealing in real life – redolent of dive bars, arcades and other unsavory venues – but neon is downright unbearable when experienced in a movie theater, where you have no choice but to stare at the screen unless you want a perfectly good $21.51 to go to waste.

black metal
Luke Coppen

Are black-metal bands going Christian?

In his youth, Emil Lundin became obsessed with the idea of recording the world’s “most evil album.” The lanky, long-haired Swede formed a black-metal band and set to work. He faced an immediate obstacle. In making history’s most nefarious musical creation, he could hardly use Swedish, with its singsong tones. English was also out of the question: he didn’t want to sound like ABBA. That left Latin, the native tongue of the occult and, it is said, of demons. In a quest for suitably devilish lyrics, he pored over arcane texts. That led him to Latin editions of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers – badass early Christian monks – and St. Augustine’s Confessions.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Florence and the Machine is back

It may be coincidence or clever record company marketing, but the two current reigning queens of the British pop music scene, Lily Allen and Florence Welch, have released their two latest records within a week of one another. Allen, who has admittedly been more involved in acting and selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans of late, brought out the excoriating and autobiographical West End Girl, which is said to explore the compromises and difficulties of her short-lived marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour. And, not to be outdone, Welch and her band Florence and the Machine have come back with her first album since 2022’s excellent Dance Fever; it promises another smorgasbord of operatic vocals, soaring choruses and BIG tunes. Does it work?

Britt McHenry

It pays to be a bad college-football coach

These days, getting fired is the best thing that can happen to a college-football coach. Hugh Freeze is the latest head coach to get voted off the NCAA college-football island. With a 15-19 record in nearly 3 seasons at Auburn University and a loss Saturday where they barely mustered 3 points against Kentucky, the Tigers fell to 1-5 in the SEC. A record like that in such a revered conference can only mean one thing in 2025: termination.As they say on Survivor, the tribe has spoken. Auburn will have to buy Freeze out for $15.4 million. It is about the same dollar amount they forked over when they canned their last coach 8 games into his second season. In total, Freeze drives away with a cool $39 million after working for only half of his six-year deal.

Friday

Orson Fry

Don McCullin shows no signs of slowing down

“Life to me has been bigger than any Hollywood film,” says legendary photojournalist Don McCullin when we meet to discuss his latest exhibition A Desecrated Serenity at New York’s Hauser & Wirth. But when I broach the subject of actual film in the works - a big Hollywood biopic involving director Justin Kurzel – McCullin would rather I didn’t: “I feel ashamed even thinking about it. If you celebrate your success, it’s damaging. I’ve always done what I’ve done because I wanted my father’s name to be important. I’ve done my best to tread the path and behave myself because his name belongs to whatever I do. He didn’t have a very long life, you see. He died at 40 when I was 13.

Matthew Gasda

The free market can’t stop AI actress Tilly Norwood

The British actress Tilly Norwood began appearing in viral videos and short films across the internet earlier this year. She is young, fresh-faced, with girl-next-door vibes. She will be signed by a major talent agency soon. But Tilly Norwood is not real. She is an artificial-intelligence synthetic. She is not in the real world, not embodied. She is not a person or an actress. She is a digital Frankenstein’s monster of video software and ChatGPT. Tilly was created by Particle6 Productions, an AI studio founded by Dutch comedian and actress Eline Van der Velden. Tilly is her project. Van der Velden moved to the UK when she was 14 to study drama and musical theater – and Tilly is fairly clearly her idealized self. Tilly, and by extension Van der Velden, is increasingly famous.