Music painted on the wall of a Venetian orphanage will be heard again nearly 250 years later
Imagine Lady Gaga or Elton John teaching at an orphanage or homeless shelter, offering daily music lessons. That’s what took place at Venice’s four Ospedali Grandi, which were charitable institutions that took in the needy – including orphaned and foundling…
Just Stop Oil attack the Rokeby Venus: how the group is using the suffragettes’ disruptive tactics to shape public opinion
Two Just Stop Oil protesters have smashed the glass on the Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez at the National Gallery in London. This, you might be surprised to hear, is not the first time this painting has been the target…
How ‘La Catrina’ became the iconic symbol of Day of the Dead
On April 13, 1944, thousands of people clashed with police on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago. The melee was unrelated to U.S. participation in World War II, labor unrest or President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s controversial move to…
This engineering course has students use their brainwaves to create performing art
Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching. Title of course: “Arts and Geometry” What prompted the idea for the course? After a serious injury in 2016, I started drawing and painting during…
David Bowie: five must-have items for the V&A’s new centre
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has announced the opening of a new David Bowie Centre for the Performing Arts in 2025 at V&A East Storehouse in east London. This follows the news that the museum has acquired –…
Royal Academy’s Spain and the Hispanic World – an expert in Spanish art reviews the exhibition
The Royal Academy’s first big show of 2023 is unusual. As well as presenting an impressive collection from Spain and the Hispanic world (around 150 items covering over 4,000 years, including paintings, sculptures, maps, books and manuscripts), it also tells…
The art of balding: a brief history of hairless men
Balding is really common, affecting more than 50% of men. It’s also physically inconsequential (bald men live just as long as haired men). So why, in his memoir Spare, does Prince Harry refer to his brother’s baldness as “alarming”? An…
Why David Hockney’s Bigger and Closer is an important step forward for immersive art shows
Artist David Hockney has ridden many technological waves. While his mark-making has remained resolutely painterly, he has challenged the practice of painting. He was an early adopter of computer-assisted drawing, using the iPad and iPhone. His latest work, Bigger and…
My art uses plastic recovered from beaches around the world to understand how our consumer society is transforming the ocean
I am obsessed with plastic objects. I harvest them from the ocean for the stories they hold and to mitigate their ability to harm. Each object has the potential to be a message from the sea – a poem, a…
ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and the collapse of the creative process
In 2022, OpenAI – one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence research laboratories – released the text generator ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E 2. While both programs represent monumental leaps in natural language processing and image generation, they’ve also…