Music & Fine Art

Where The Love Light Gleams (Or: Christmas as Ritualized Trauma)

'I'll Be Home for Christmas' and similar ballads share a common origin that explains why they're so good at helping us exorcise personal and cultural…

Dec 21, 2024 •

What This Statue Teaches Us About Art, Colonialism, and Ourselves

Michael Parekōwhai's 'The English Channel' takes the metaphorical role of the viewer literally - providing a singular master class for all storytellers

Dec 7, 2024 •

David Bowie on the Two Biggest Mistakes Artists Make

In a soulful interview from 1997, the rock icon offered some brief, but essential advice about how to create great art

Oct 7, 2024 •

Oh No, the Olympics Threw a Big Queer Dinner Party!

What Madonna can teach us about the Paris opening ceremony, the manufactured controversy around it, and many liberals' silly attempts to pretend it…

Aug 3, 2024 •

Is 'Diamond Dogs' David Bowie’s Greatest Album?

On its 50th anniversary, let's dissect the icon’s eighth studio album to try to understand what makes it such a work of postmodern rock genius - and…

May 25, 2024 •

I Want to Break Free (From Your Lies)

From Freddie Mercury to 'M*A*S*H', to Irving Berlin and my own grandfather - a partial, fragmented, and often contradictory history of America's…

Mar 30, 2024 •

To Be or Not to Be: 'Ophelia' and (More) Tension of Becoming

A brief examination of John Evert Millais’s iconic 'Hamlet'-inspired painting

Mar 4, 2024 •

How John Denver Helped Me Find My Way Back Home

Music can connect us to each other, through grief and sometimes even across time and space

Feb 24, 2024 •

Sam Cooke's 'A Change Is Gonna Come' and the Audacity of Hope

Sixty years after the iconic song's release, its message couldn't feel more naive...or more necessary

Feb 3, 2024 •

We're All Made of Horrible, Beautiful Scars

Australian rocker Nick Cave, Native American activist/poet John Trudell, and a 14th-century Japanese shogun have thoughts about how to put ourselves…

Jan 20, 2024 •

What David Bowie Read (Or: 100 Ways to Make Yourself More Creative)

And if not more creative, at least a hell of a lot more interesting...

Jan 8, 2024 •

Be Like Bowie…or Die Trying

The rock star’s amorphous identity reveals a creative disdain for complacency, providing a rare rule all artists — from musicians, to authors, to…

Dec 19, 2023 •

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