Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Las Meninas (detail), by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Arts & Letters

Volume III, Number 2 | spring 2010

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Preamble

Lady in a Veil

By Lewis H. Lapham

Despite being told that art is somehow sacred, it’s better to take a naive delight in the thing itself.

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Beauty Is Shoe

By Wendy Steiner

Is the model a subject, or is the subject a model?

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Map

Telling Tales

The evolutions of four stories.

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1939 | New York City

David Selznick Gives a Damn

“Gone with the Wind” must not be censored.More

1973 | New York City

Blue Chips

Pop Art profit making.More

c. 680 | North Yorkshire

Divine Inspiration

God gives man the art of song.More

Charts & Graphs

Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

The time it took to create great works of art.

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Engraving of Pliny the Elder.

German philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno.

Color portrait of Russian poet, novelist, and dramatist Aleksandr Pushkin.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

—Lester Bangs, 1971

Friedrich Schiller & David Foster Wallace

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Capturing Martin Luther King Jr. and Elvis

By Preston Lauterbach

Looking at 1968 through the eyes of photographer Ernest Withers. More

DÉjÀ Vu

Love Is Dead

2018:

Woman announces she is divorcing her pirate ghost husband.

1926:

Man sues wife for adultery with a ghost.

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The World in Time

Alan Rusbridger

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Alan Rusbridger, author of Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now. More

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