Art today is in deep crisis. Criticism seems to have abandoned any notion of evaluation, the public has been denied the possibility of understanding, and aesthetics have lost all legitimacy. Formerly, artists claimed their right to decide for themsel...

Pablo Picasso was one of the most prodigious and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, art collector, eccentric and self-styled genius. Her Paris home was the leading salon for ar...

Artist meets writer; young woman meets older man; daughter meets father. All these encounters are played out in the arresting conversations between the artist Ninar Esper (b. 1971) and the father she hardly knew, the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis (b. 1...

Tzvetan Todorov is one of Europe's leading intellectuals. Beyond his work in cultural and literary theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis, Todorov's influence is extraordinarily far-reaching specifically because of the clarity of his writing and his r...

In the autumn of 1924, just before Andre Breton published the "Manifeste du surrealisme", two young men met in Paris for the first time. Georges Bataille, 27, starting work at the Bibliotheque Nationale; Michel Leiris, 23, beginning his studies in et...

"All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles" – Guy Debord. Guy Debord is one of the 20th Century's most prophetic critics. His bestselling work, "Society of...