skopia
Burckhardt invented cultural history by looking past popes and battles at how Renaissance Italians lived, finding the moment people began to think of themselves as individuals. We still see the period his way.
Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage, writes Okakura, a Japanese art curator addressing the West, who then draws from one cup an entire aesthetic of imperfection and attention.
Modern art's century, from the Eiffel Tower to the moment modernism became the official culture it once attacked. Hughes explains what Picasso and Pollock were after in plain, unhurried English.
Modern painting had become an illustration of theory, Wolfe argued, invisible without the words. He named the three critics who ruled taste in New York, and the art world came after him howling.