Painting
Zurbarán on Freud’s couch
An acclaimed new exhibition is full of overwrought symbolism and compositional failures
Soft competition
There are participation prizes to everyone at the Venice Biennale
Heart of darkness
Alexander Adams encounters an unflinching master of sex and death in Vienna
Britain must maintain its cultural inheritance
We should not allow our masterpieces to disappear overseas
An ode to situated exhibitions
Art is inseparable from the poetics of place
The (too) many deaths of Saint Sebastian
Ming Wong lacks the power and sensuality of his supposed inspirations
The darkness of enlightenment
A new exhibition of the work of Joseph Wright of Derby has much to tell us about science and the soul
Puzzles, Picassos and prophecies
Untangling this jumble is aesthetically pleasurable, but vexing intellectually
Caravaggio’s great extremes
Caravaggio’s art is a vivid rebuke to an artificial idealised reality
Was this Chinese painter mad?
His style and eccentric life were to prove highly influential to younger artists
Most Read
The martyrdom of Young Bob
On ebbing power of the political influencer
Grooming gangs and the truth
We should not give ammunition to deniers of the grooming gangs scandal
Babies need women
Leaving children with only men who are not their parents is foolish and dangerous
Stop ignoring the Islamisation of our democracy
The British state is bending to Islamism, not attempting to defeat it
Why has Keir Starmer been so unpopular?
He was the perfect embodiment of a failing system
The great recoupling
Our politicians have a bizarre sense of costs and benefits when it comes to energy
We need to make a better case against Magic Monetary Theory
Simplistic rebuttals help MMT endure. We need better arguments
The meaning of Zack Polanski
The icon of geriatric millennials is one of life’s drifters
What has Labour learned?
Pinning the failures of the government on Keir Starmer alone will not work
An elusive eatery
Total failure, redeemed by souvlaki and chips at the kebab stand
When imitation is more then just flattery
An informative and entertaining history of plagiarism in its many forms
The sacrifice that changed Naipaul
The humiliation of his father, forced to slaughter a goat to atone for
angering Hindus, made the writer wary of insulting religion
The centre-left is out of ideas
The new journal Arguably barely makes an argument
The government must curb its appetite for junk policy
The “junk food advertising ban” is indigestible nonsense
The Book of JO’B
James O’Brien’s aggressive incuriosity is becoming ever more embattled as his worldview crumbles
The decline of British food culture
The products of social media virality and high street homogenisation leave the ambitious diner as cold as a neglected jacket potato