High Culture
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The Rijksmuseum employed an AI to repaint lost parts of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch.” Here’s how they did it.
Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch-born, New York-based journalist reporting on art, history, and literature. He studied early Netherlandish painting and Slavic literature at New York University, worked as an editorial[…]
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“The Man in the High Castle” may be the most beloved alternate history book, but it is not the most historically accurate.
These composers channeled the horror of the Holocaust and Hiroshima while honoring those who lived through it.
Piano Sonata No. 23 offers a window into the way culture became an instrument of Soviet state policy.
Not every classic enjoyed rave reviews from the start.
One from New Guinea rose to the top in a recent study.
Some authors never saw their books score widespread acclaim—or even get published at all.
To understand Vincent van Gogh, we must first debunk the myth of the tortured artist. Van Gogh believed his illness inhibited his creativity.
It’s a lot easier to point out things that are gezellig (adjective) than it is to define gezelligheid (noun) itself.
Try writing a novel without using the letter “e.”
In order to figure out how English might evolve in the future, we have to look at how it has changed in the near and distant past.
“Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
Monsters have always represented societal fears, but narrative art also casts doubt on whether we fully understand our monsters — and their slayers.
Some classic books, like Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” remain controversial to this day.
What is Captain America doing in ancient Mesopotamia?
“Like real dreams, it does not explain, does not complete its sequences,” film critic Roger Ebert once wrote about “Mulholland Drive.”
Jules Verne wrote about gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, and global warming more than a century ago.
For Nietzsche, a great work of art can either veil the horror of reality or – better yet – help us face it.
Take a trip through these master-crafted fantasy societies and ask yourself: Could I actually live there?
“Painfully forced” is how one contemporary critic described Fitzgerald’s writing style.
Would you want to live in any of these places?
From the Palace of the Soviets to The Illinois, these unmade buildings would have taken the art of architecture to whole new heights.
This year marks 2,000 years since the birth of the Roman author of the first natural encyclopedia.
Art criticism is inherently subjective. Still, many critics have tried to make a case for why some of the world’s most celebrated books are in fact terribly written.
In the West, discussions of 20th-century painting are dominated by Warhol and Picasso, but trendsetting artists are found everywhere.
If you get married in South Africa, don’t be surprised if someone shows up to the ceremony dragging along a smelly goat.
Could the prevalence of flood myths around the world tell us something about early human migration or even the way our brains work?
To answer that question, we may have to figure out when the famed painter started to go bald.
Created in the 1880s, “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan,” which depicts a father murdering his son, divides Russians to this day.
Most popular songs are about love and heartache. But some great songs — albeit underrated and perhaps a bit weird — are about the cities we love.
If tourism is the lifeblood of the Peruvian economy, then Machu Picchu is the heart pumping that blood — in sickness and in health.