Art

Andy Warhol famously said that ‘the best museum is a department store.’ And from the looks of it, museums are pursuing excellence rather perspicaciously. Museums may stock art, but what they sell is cultural pretensions, cultured erudition, a dollop of snobbery — to be served with tart to lesser beings— and

“Frida’s favorite subject was herself,” Meir Ronnen wrote in a review of Fridas Vater. Roughly one third (fifty-five) of Frida Kahlo’s paintings are self-portraits. The sheer number and preponderance of self-portraiture in her body of work is unmatched except perhaps by Munch, Rembrandt, and van Gogh. Comparing her

The late capitalist novel or the latte novel Post-nineties, a new novel has come into vogue, as is evident from the homage it regularly receives from reviewers at NY Times and other prominent publications, a novel full of superfluous pseudo-intelligent text. It is the novel by the smart aleck. A

If social sciences have been sprinting breathlessly towards positivism, art history has been running, equally fast, away from it. Art history’s subjectivist turn can be traced back to postmodernism, and particularly hermeneutics and phenomenology, which pretty much gave immunity to virtually all kinds of interpretations–as long as they

Secret Love In Peach Blossom Land is one of those plays that use comedy to comment on the tragic. Influential Taiwan based playwright Stan Lai (Lai Shengchuan), feted as “Asia’s Top Theater Director” (Asiaweek), masterfully amalgamates two plays with parallel storylines to create a multilayered, rich, and thought-provoking play

“Shakespeare Wallah” was my introduction to the magic of Merchant Ivory Productions. An elegy to a lost era, a bitter-sweet tale of a traveling English theatre troupe in India right after the Indian independence, it is still vivid in my memory. The debonair Shashi Kapoor and Satyajit Ray’s beautiful