Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the world’s most visited artwork. Its appeal rests partly on several mysteries.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Arts + Culture – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 2076 - 2100 of 5203 articles
Steven Oliver’s new cabaret show is an exhilarating journey through hard-hitting stories about success, love, depression and racism.
A recent Vatican commission report on women’s ordination as deacons was inconclusive. But allowing women priests would help the Catholic Church achieve much-needed reform.
Queerdom, an exhibition of photography and poetry, presents a history of queer and trans performance in Sydney that challenges recent narratives about queer life in Australia.
For poet John Kinsella, veganism is an ethics of commitment. Living as a vegan, he writes, is not a holier-than-thou situation, but a move towards being more respectful of life.
Denied an education in 1930s Australia because she was too black, Isabel Flick went on to fight segregation at her local cinema in the early 1960s. She became a powerful campaigner for Indigenous rights.
In 1918, in Wünsdorf prisoner-of-war camp, a German sculptor created a bust of Indigenous soldier Douglas Grant. For decades, the whereabouts of this nationally significant sculpture were unknown - until now.
A maar is a volcanic crater, often filled with water. New research highlights the similarities between oral stories around the world that shed light on the formation of these craters.
Boys are scientists, girls are ballerinas - that’s if girls appear at all. A recent analysis of bestselling picture books shows gender stereotypes are alive and well.
Walt Whitman is perhaps America’s most admired poet. His work, now praised for its themes of equality and democracy, was once shunned for its experimental verse and discussion of sexuality.
In our world of pervasive consumerism, libraries continue to be founded on humanism. Their core purpose as accessible places is vital – yet they are also now popular tourist destinations.
True crime-related storytelling has shrugged off its former low-brow baggage. Two recent Australian books show how victims’ stories can be told sensitively and humanely.
A new exhibition pairs China’s famed Terracotta Warriors with contemporary works of inspiring ethereality. The contrasts here are many: life and death, harmony and chaos, energy and control, art and politics.
Popular monsters often reflect humanity’s greatest fears. Godzilla, with its destructive rampages, is the foremost monster for our age of environmental threat.
Written by a former lawyer, a new play presents a forceful critique of the Australian legal system’s treatment of sexual assault.
Gioachino Rossini’s opera was originally meant as a satire of royalist France. A new production updates the work for a modern audience, setting the drama in a museum where the paintings come to life.
From the Joker to a Game of Thrones prequel, origin stories are increasingly common in film and TV – perhaps at the expense of originality in popular culture.
From Steve Smith’s tearful apology to anonymous apps like Whisper, public confessions can be therapeutic, emancipatory, or potentially exploitative.
Writing episodic TV, scriptwriters traditionally work from a principle of having three stories woven together through an episode. These are known as the A story, the B story and the C story.
Along with a belief in miracles, other key aspects of Pentecostal doctrine – from divine providence to pietism – will likely shape the actions of our re-elected Prime Minister.
Despite the exclusion of their creative work from mainstream opera companies, Australian women composers are creating spaces for themselves, writing work that tackles urgent social issues.
Ennigaldi-Nanna is largely unknown in the modern day. But in 530BC, this Mesopotamian priestess worked to arrange and label various artefacts in the world’s first museum.
An Australian documentary about a group of young Afghanis who form a heavy-metal band highlights rock’s subversive power.
Fan culture is thriving in Westeros. Although HBO’s Game of Thrones has ended, fans will ensure that the show lives on (and changes) across multimedia platforms, long into the future.
Long known as a spectacle of quirky Euro-kitsch, this year’s contest more closely resembled singing TV shows such as The Voice. Notable exceptions, however, were Iceland’s Hatari and our own Kate Miller-Heidke.