Art
Stars, stripes and dollars
Michael Prodger on the artists who make huge sums for painting the US flag
The key to the collapse of our cultural self-confidence
Why have our great cultural institutions been among the first to fall?
Policing art is a slippery slope
The hunger for policing thoughts as well as bodies hasn’t been eradicated, as recent events in New Zealand show
“A metal barbie on the crest of an £143,000 turd”
Mary Wollstonecraft’s statue is a failed attempt to depict an “everywoman”
Tate Modern in a terrible tangle
Tate Modern gets itself in a terrible tangle over a cancelled show
How not to lose your marbles
Selling the Royal Academy’s greatest treasure would be risky and morally wrong
The Mirror of #MeToo
Luciano Garbati’s new work expresses a widespread decline in symbolic literacy
An extreme form of criticism
Works by Michelangelo, Velázquez, Rodin, Rothko and Mondrian have all been vandalised for reasons of mental instability or political activism or both, informs Michael Prodger
When you pile tragedy too high, you sell it too cheap
Among the Trees, Hayward Gallery (until 31 October)
Artists shaped by war
Practically all the artists in the book are traumatised in one way or another, and all experienced war
Most Read
Tame Impala fails to impress
unconquered by a
taste of Crusader food
Gary Stevenson is wrong about wealth taxes
The popular economist is irritating, but more importantly he is mistaken
Why they hated Ann Widdecombe
Fair-minded people could agree or disagree with her opinions. Left-wing bigots hated her for not abandoning them
What is wrong now was wrong before
Julia Gillard should not pretend that the “unintended consequences” of the gender debate were unknowable
Ethnic minorities are abandoning Labour
It is not just Muslim voters who have been abandoning the Labour Party
Joyous genre-bending
Milestones (Signum Classics)
Rock star variations
Bows and Arrows: The Autobiography by Julian Lloyd Webber
Selling the commons
How Britain put a price on nature
So long, Socrates
Socrates turned relentless questioning into a way of life — and paid for it with his own
The ballad of Robbie and Harry
Sometimes, the struggle can become the art
The pitfalls of epistemic snobbery
The “Sophie of Dundee” case proves that confirmation bias is a double-edged sword
The government must defuse a legal time bomb
Countries of the “Global South” could sue the UK over greenhouse gas emissions
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
Why Keynes was wrong
He misinterpreted fundamental economic principles
The gifts of gentle density
There are all but endless benefits to building more beautifully
Are Reform the new Greens?
As the Green Party loses interest in rural matters, Richard Negus considers the claim that British agriculture and the countryside have a new champion