After years of staggering relations, the United States formally announced its break from UNESCO earlier in October. The decision is expected to take effect by the end of 2018, when the country will continue to participate in the organization as a nonmember observer. The Trump administration has met with mounting criticism for its decision to withdraw from the world’s most prominent cultural organization. Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s current director general, expressed regret over t

Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys Until 21st January 2018, the Courtauld Gallery, revered for its post-impressionist collection, will be displaying “an outstanding group of portraits by Chaïm Soutine”. This cohesive exhibition explores the artist’s fascination with the often lesser acknowledged hotel cooks and waiting staff of the grand Paris hotels. The immensely emotive portraits are said to have been pivotal in Soutine’s career, transforming him from strugglin

Illustration by Matthew Page. Are you left-brained or right-brained? Are you more analytical and logical in your thinking, or more intuitive and imaginative? This concept of the brain having a dominant hemisphere has pervaded popular culture since it was first proposed in the 1960s. While it is true that the two halves of the brain are different from each other and process different sorts of information, is one really dominant over the other? This is not so. In fact, neurosci

Illustration by Anna Seibæk Torp-Pedersen. Upon taking someone to the opera for the first time, I might well choose Puccini’s La Bohème. It’s a classic, the music is exquisite, and the story contains all the emotional highs and lows one expects from opera. This new production at the Royal Opera House, directed by Richard Jones, has a lot of expectations to live up to, as it replaces a well-loved older production that ran for 41 years. Set around 1830, La Bohème tells the stor

Basquiat: Boom for Real The Barbican Art Gallery’s Basquiat exhibition, Boom for Real, showcases a number of the great works by the late 20th century icon Jean-Michel Basquiat. The exhibition, curated by Dr Dieter Buchhart and Eleanor Nairne, examines the young artist’s unique and all-too-short career, from his beginnings as Soho’s most exciting young graffiti artist to the height of his fame in the late 80s. For many, Basquiat is more than just an artist – he’s regarded as a

Bill Haley, Rock Around the Clock, 1950s, Lathe/hand-cut record on x-ray film. X-RAY AUDIO Collection What would you do if tomorrow your government banned all your favourite songs, sent your country’s most popular singers to jail, and severely restricted access to foreign music? Whilst today this sounds like an impossible dystopia to many of us, it is what the population of the Soviet Union had to deal with between 1946 and 1964. To infringe on the state’s control over the re