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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The Sacred Word

By Sabiha Al Khemir

By beautifying the word of God, the medium and the message became interconnected.

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Map

Telling Tales

The evolutions of four stories.

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c. 25 BC | Rome

Practice and Theory

Vitruvius defines the relationship.More

1913 | Moscow

Vasily Kandinsky Replaces the Object

“The creation of works of art is the creation of the world.”More

1859 | Lucerne

Money Order

Richard Wagner asks for a little encouragement.More

Charts & Graphs

Adaptations

Artists who overcame physical disabilities.

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Portrait of English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

German writer Friedrich Schiller.

Engraving of Roman poet Horace.

black and white photo of Kurt Vonnegut sitting over coffee and a book

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

Walter Benjamin & Andy Warhol

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

The School Formerly Known as LeConte

By Lauren Markham

A debate in Berkeley about the power of a name. More

Man and Woman Being Chased by Bees (detail), by Honoré Daumier. The New York Public Library, Art and Picture Collection.

DÉjÀ Vu

The Perfect Swarm

2018:

The NYPD beekeeper vacuums up a swarm of bees on a hot dog stand in Times Square.

1906:

Bees take over a Los Angeles street as spectators watch.

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The World in Time

Jim Holt

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Jim Holt, author of When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought. More

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