Documenta 12

Documenta occurs every five years. This time the show features installations like Churchill Madikida’s “Status,” shown here.
The world-famous contemporary art exhibition Documenta 12 opens in Kassel, Germany on Saturday.

T. W. Adorno

Music and Language: A Fragment
Music resembles a language. Expressions such as musical idiom,
musical intonation, are not simply metaphors. But music is not
identical with language. The resemblance points to something
essential, but vague. Anyone who takes it literally will be seriously
misled.
Music resembles language in the sense that it is a temporal
sequence of articulated sounds which are more [...]

Has Art Basel lost out to Venice and Documenta?

The great European summer of art (the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, ­Documenta in Kassel and Sculpture Project in Münster) may be a dream for art-lovers, but is a test for the budgets and staff time available to cash-strapped museums. Even before The Art Newspaper team left London and New York, there were rumours that some [...]

The secret world of E M Forster: The novelist’s letters reveal his private passions

When I was growing up in the Bombay of the 1960s, we thought EM Forster’s A Passage to India the greatest novel ever written about the subcontinent. Later, as a student demonstrating against the Vietnam War, I reread the book as a more timeless and universal critique of imperial arrogance. I often wondered what had [...]

Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent

The countdown to Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent has started with the curator and some of the artists featured in this the ground-breaking art exhibition beginning to arrive in South Africa.
Africa Remix – which runs at the Johannesburg Art Gallery from June 24 to September 30 – features the work of more than [...]

Edvard Grieg – In the Hall of the Mountain King

Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen on 15 June 1843 and lived until 4 September 1907.

Children of war

What Is the What, Dave Eggers, Hamish Hamilton, 480pp, £18.99A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah, Fourth Estate, 229pp, £14.99
Burma Boy, Biyi Bandele, Jonathan Cape, 212pp, £12.99
As an African writer whose work centres primarily on the lives of African characters displaced and damaged by coups, wars and the subsequent migration they [...]

British Essayists: George Orwell – Politics and the English Language –

“Politics and the English Language” first appeared in Horizon no. 76, April 1946. It was republished in an Orwell collection “Inside the Whale and Other Essays“, Penguin, UK, 1962Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we [...]