Category: Aesthetics
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Ivor Novello and the Lost Language of British Glamour
Ivor Novello has survived in British culture in a peculiarly ghostly form. His name remains everywhere, attached to one of the country’s most prestigious songwriting honours, and yet the man himself has drifted into soft focus. Many know the Ivor Novello Awards. Far fewer could say with confidence who Novello was, what he made, or…
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The Little Man in the Big House: Hercule Poirot and the Strangeness of England
Agatha Christie gave the world’s most famous detective a moustache, a foreign accent, and a profound dislike of the English countryside. It was, in every sense, the point. By Bergotte There is a village in the English imagination that has never quite existed and has never stopped existing. It has a church with a Norman…
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The Education of Helplessness: Of Human Bondage and the Novel That Refused to Lie
Somerset Maugham called it the book that saved his life. He also said it was the worst kind of novel — an autobiographical one. He was right on both counts, which is precisely why it endures. By Bergotte There is a type of novel that functions less like a work of art than like a…
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What We Lose When We Love: The Way We Were and the Myth of the Perfect Compromise
It was sold as a love story. It was actually an argument about America — about politics, memory, and the terrible cost of choosing comfort over conviction. By Bergotte There is a moment near the end of The Way We Were, Sydney Pollack’s 1973 film, that has lodged itself in the cultural memory with a…
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The Scrawl of the Gods: Cy Twombly and the Art of Forgetting
He made paintings that looked like vandalism, drawings that resembled the work of a distracted child, and sculptures that seemed to be falling apart. He also changed the course of Western art. By Bergotte There is a canvas in the Menil Collection in Houston, twelve feet wide, that appears, at first glance, to have been…
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The Architecture of Silence: John Pawson and the Art of Less
He has built monasteries, fashion temples, and homes for the hyper-wealthy. But John Pawson’s real subject has always been the same: what happens when you take everything away. By Bergotte There is a room in the Czech countryside, an hour south of Prague, that has no decoration whatsoever. Its walls are limestone. Its floor is…
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The Brutality of Fact: David Sylvester and the Vocation of Looking
The greatest British art critic of the twentieth century never wrote a book he was satisfied with. What he left behind instead was something rarer — a model of attention so exacting it changed what art could ask of its audience. By Bergotte There is a way of sitting in front of a painting that…
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Ways of Being Seen: John Berger and the Art of Paying Attention
Eight years after his death, the critic, novelist, and storyteller who changed how we look at art remains the most generous — and the most radical — writer England ever produced. By Bergotte There is a moment in the first episode of Ways of Seeing — the 1972 BBC television series that made John Berger,…
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The Wound and the Camera: Susan Sontag and the Unfinished Project of Seeing
Twenty years after her death, the great critic’s ideas about images, suffering, and the moral life feel less like history than like prophecy. By Bergotte There is a photograph that Susan Sontag never saw — or rather, she could not have seen it in the form we now encounter it, scrolling past it on a…
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Ripley Part II: The Many Lives of Tom Ripley: From Highsmith’s Novels to Screen Legends
When Patricia Highsmith published The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, she created a new kind of antihero: elegant, amoral, adaptable, and disturbingly successful. Tom Ripley not only survives but thrives, slipping into identities, murdering when necessary, and always convincing us — against our better judgment — to follow him. Over five novels (collectively known as…
