The long arc of the canon.
Showing 15,530 works across all media from all time
Like a Rolling Stone
A snare crack, a sneer, and Kooper's uninvited organ swirling through the song that split rock open.
The Godfather
The summit of the American crime film: Coppola turned an immigrant family's rise and rot into the country's own epic, and made damnation look like a coronation.
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Three panels run from Eden to hell, with a whole naked humanity climbing into giant fruit in between. Nobody has settled what it means.
Respect
Aretha takes Otis Redding's song away from him for good, spells out the demand, and never gives it back.
The Iliad
Achilles withdraws from the fighting over a stolen prize and his friends die outside Troy for it. Nothing written about war since has matched Homer's fury, or the mercy of the final scene.
Citizen Kane
Welles was twenty-five and had never directed a feature before: he built a portrait of a man whose whole life nobody around him can add up, and changed everything.
Pet Sounds
Brian Wilson made it with session players while the rest of the band toured, using bicycle bells, dog whistles and a Coca-Cola can.
Mona Lisa
She was probably Lisa Gherardini, a merchant's wife, and Leonardo kept reworking her for years and never handed the portrait over.
A Day in the Life
Two unfinished songs bolted together, an orchestra climbing to nothing, and the last piano chord in pop.
Seven Samurai
Every film about assembling a team for one last job descends from this one: Kurosawa makes seven men matter, then stages a battle in the mud nobody has equaled.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Hamlet's father appears as a ghost and demands revenge, and the prince spends the play failing to take it. Four centuries of readers have found their own divided minds in his hesitation.
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Four chords, a mumble nobody could decipher, and the riff that ended one decade of rock and started another.
Guernica
A screaming horse, a mother with her dead child, all in grey. Picasso painted it in weeks after German bombers leveled a Basque town.
Revolver
On Tomorrow Never Knows, engineers held five tape loops on pencils and mixed them live. No Beatle plays an instrument on Eleanor Rigby.
The Odyssey
Ten years of storms, monsters, and a goddess who will not let him go stand between a soldier and his own front door. Every adventure story since descends from Odysseus.
Vertigo
Nobody has ever made obsession look this beautiful or this sick: a man falls for an image instead of a person, and Hitchcock follows him past every point it should stop.
What's Going On
Party chatter, a sax that sighs, and Gaye asking the question Motown begged him not to ask.
The Divine Comedy
No poem has reached higher. Dante goes down through hell, up the mountain of purgatory, and into the light of God, settling scores with real Florentines and arriving where Beatrice waits.
Kind of Blue
Davis handed the players sketches on the day and most of what you hear is a first take. Two sessions, and it was done.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Kubrick took the audience from the first bone tool to the far side of Jupiter, explained almost nothing, and made every science fiction film since look domestic by comparison.
Las Meninas
The Infanta and her maids fill the room, but Velázquez has put himself at his easel and the king and queen in a mirror behind.
(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction
Keith dreamt the fuzz riff, taped it half-asleep, and woke up holding the sound of teenage frustration.
War and Peace
Five families carried through Napoleon's invasion of Russia, with battle, marriage, farming, and a theory of history held in one design. You finish it knowing these people better than your own friends.
Tokyo Story
The quiet masterpiece of ordinary life: Ozu finds the ache of a whole century in parents visiting children who have no time for them, and it will find you too.
Good Vibrations
Brian Wilson's pocket symphony, months and a fortune spent chasing one shimmering theremin line into the sunlight.
Highway 61 Revisited
Al Kooper was not the organ player and sat down at it anyway, which is the sound everybody remembers from Like a Rolling Stone.
Primavera
Venus stands in an orange grove while the Graces dance and spring arrives at her right. The meadow holds hundreds of identifiable plants.
The Holy Bible (King James Version)
God makes the world, loses the people in it, and spends the rest of the book getting them back. The English of this translation is the English later writers have had to answer.
The Godfather: Part II
Coppola did what almost nobody manages, and made a sequel with a real claim to surpassing the original: two eras of one family run side by side, and the colder one wins.
Billie Jean
That bassline, mixed and remixed until it gleamed, and the four minutes that integrated MTV.
The Ghent Altarpiece (Adoration of the Mystic Lamb)
Saints and pilgrims stream toward a bleeding Lamb across a dozen hinged panels. One of them was stolen in 1934 and has never been found.
What's Going On
Berry Gordy called it the worst thing he had ever heard and refused to release it until Gaye said he would never record for Motown again.
King Lear
An old king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters how much they love him, and the truthful one says least. Shakespeare wrote nothing bleaker, and the last scene is unbearable.
Johnny B. Goode
Chuck Berry's intro lick is rock's opening statement, a country boy's origin myth now drifting past the solar system.
Lawrence of Arabia
There is no better argument for seeing a film on the largest screen you can find: Lean's desert swallows the frame, and a British officer dissolves inside it over nearly four hours.
The Last Supper (da Vinci)
Christ has just said one of them will betray him, and the shock rolls down the table. Leonardo's experimental paint began flaking in his lifetime.
Symphony No. 9
Amateur players filled out the orchestra at the premiere after only two rehearsals, and the singers complained that the high notes were unsingable.
Don Quixote
An old man reads himself mad on chivalry, names himself a knight, and rides out with a farmer for a squire. Four hundred years on the book is still hilarious and still heartbreaking.
Strawberry Fields Forever
Two takes in different keys and tempos spliced into one, a Mellotron haze over Lennon's Liverpool childhood.
Schindler's List
More people have understood the Holocaust through this film than through any other: Spielberg took no fee, shot it in black and white, and gave the last word to the survivors.
A Change is Gonna Come
Cooke wrote it after a motel turned him away, and sang it like a hymn he already knew by heart.
The Birth of Venus
Venus arrives on a scallop shell in a fall of roses, painted on canvas at a time when almost everyone still worked on panel.
Casablanca
Proof that a studio picture thrown together in a hurry can outlive everything around it: eighty years on, the lines are still in the language and the romance still lands.
Ulysses
Leopold Bloom walks Dublin for one day in June 1904, and Joyce pours the whole English language into it. Bloom, advertising canvasser and cuckold, is the kindest man in fiction.
God Only Knows
It opens by admitting doubt and spends the next two minutes refuting it; McCartney still calls it the greatest.
Creation of Adam
God surges out of a red cloak full of angels, and Michelangelo leaves the fingers not quite touching. The gap does the work.
Singin' in the Rain
Nothing else on film is this happy, and the subject is an industry in a panic: Hollywood's terror at the arrival of sound became two hours of pure delight.
Abbey Road
The last album they recorded together, with side two stitched out of songs nobody had finished. The cover shoot took about ten minutes.
In Search of Lost Time (set of 6)
The most complete account of memory ever written. A man tastes a madeleine, and three thousand pages of remembered love, jealousy, and vanished aristocrats change permanently how you look at your own past.
Whole Lotta Love
Page's riff, Plant's howl, and a theremin freakout in the middle that still sounds like the roof coming off.
The Brothers Karamazov
Old Karamazov is murdered and each of his three sons had reason. Around the crime Dostoevsky stages the fiercest argument fiction has ever made about God and the suffering of children.
Apocalypse Now
No production has ever gone further off the rails or shown it more clearly: Coppola's Vietnam abandons the war film for pure hallucination, and the helicopters over the trees are permanent.
Nevermind
The baby on the cover was paid two hundred dollars. Four months after release it knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the chart.
Winged Victory of Samothrace
Nike lands on a warship's prow, wings still open, sea wind pressing the marble drapery flat against her striding body.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Anna Karenina
Anna leaves her husband for a young officer while, in the other half of the book, Levin farms and marries and worries about God. Tolstoy gives both lives the same total sympathy.
I Want to Hold Your Hand
Handclaps, that leaping chord under "I can't hide," and five weeks later America belonged to them.
Dr. Strangelove
Nuclear annihilation has never been this funny, and never will be again: Kubrick worked out that the strategy was already absurd, and simply let his generals talk.
Mask of Tutankhamun
Eleven kilograms of gold inlaid with lapis and carnelian, lifted by Howard Carter from the innermost of three coffins in 1925.
Goldberg Variations
The pianist Glenn Gould plays it fast and dry and hums audibly throughout, which the engineers could never get him to stop doing.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Crime and Punishment
Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker to prove he stands above ordinary morality, then comes apart as a magistrate circles him. It reads like a thriller and works like a confession.
Heartbreak Hotel
Elvis's first RCA single, all cavernous echo and empty rooms, the loneliest number one ever cut.
Goodfellas
Every gangster film of the last thirty years is arguing with this one: Scorsese made the life so intoxicating for an hour that the comedown lands like a physical event.
St Matthew Passion
Two choirs and two orchestras face each other across the church and answer one another, while a boys' choir cuts through both from above.
Moby Dick
American fiction has attempted nothing bigger. Ahab drags a whaling crew across the world after the whale that took his leg, and Melville keeps stopping the hunt to explain whales.
Starry Night
Van Gogh painted the churning sky and its eleven stars from a window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, partly from memory.
Strange Fruit
A Bronx schoolteacher's poem about lynching, sung in a single spotlight, still the bravest three minutes on record.
Taxi Driver
Travis Bickle escaped the picture and entered the language: Scorsese and De Niro made a lonely man's interior so exact that it stopped being about one man at all.
David
The marble block had been abandoned as flawed before Michelangelo took it, and he carved a boy who is watching Goliath, not beating him.
Middlemarch
Dorothea Brooke marries a dry scholar for the wrong reasons and a gifted doctor lets small compromises close around him. Eliot knows more about how people actually fail than any English novelist.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
It took about seven hundred hours of studio time when their first album took one day, and no singles were released from it.
Here Comes the Sun
Harrison wrote it in Clapton's garden while skipping a business meeting, and it sounds exactly like that relief.
Raging Bull
Scorsese shot boxing as penance rather than sport, and audiences come out feeling bruised: De Niro's jealousy destroys everyone near him, in the blackest black and white imaginable.
Terracotta Army
Thousands of life-size clay soldiers in battle formation, no two faces alike, guarding an emperor's tomb since 210 BC.
Tutti-Frutti
A nonsense holler cleaned up just enough to press, and the moment rock and roll stopped asking permission.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of one family in Macondo, where insomnia comes as a plague and the rain lasts four years. García Márquez reports the impossible as plain fact.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Every adventure film since is measured against it: Spielberg and Lucas built a machine of chases and near misses so efficient that forty years of imitation have not worn it out.
Fountain
Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt to an exhibition he was helping to judge, and the committee rejected it.
Hound Dog
Leiber and Stoller wrote it for Big Mama Thornton; Elvis took it, sped it up, and set it on fire.
Thriller
Quincy Jones and Jackson remixed the whole record because the first version sounded thin, and Eddie Van Halen played his solo for free.
Aeneid
Aeneas carries his father out of burning Troy and is sent to found Rome, abandoning the queen who loves him. Duty wins, and Dido's grief is the greatest passage in Latin poetry.
Hey Jude
Seven minutes, four of them just na-na-na, and somehow nobody has ever wanted it to end sooner.
Psycho
The film that invented modern horror: Hitchcock broke an unspoken rule about how a story is meant to behave, and every thriller since has been working in the space he opened.
Blood on the Tracks
Dylan finished it, then rerecorded half the songs in Minneapolis with local musicians his brother rounded up, days before it was due out.
The School of Athens
Plato and Aristotle argue at the center of a hall where Raphael gave the philosophers the faces of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Bramante.
The Message
The record that proved hip hop could report and not just party, and the edge everyone's been close to since.
Paradise Lost
Satan rebels in heaven, loses, and comes for the first two people. Milton meant to justify God and produced a devil so magnificent he nearly walks off with the greatest poem in English.
Requiem
An anonymous stranger commissioned it and Mozart died before finishing. A pupil completed the rest, and arguments about which bars are his continue.
Pulp Fiction
Young filmmakers were allowed to sound different after this one: Tarantino let two hitmen argue about hamburgers for ten minutes, and an entire decade of American cinema followed.
Water Lilies (Nympheas Cycle)
Monet painted these eight murals of his pond for two oval rooms in Paris while his eyesight failed. They opened months after he died.
Yesterday
McCartney dreamt the melody, called it "Scrambled Eggs" for weeks, then let a string quartet make it immortal.
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Modern Hollywood begins here: Lucas told the oldest story there is inside a universe that looked used and lived in, and the blockbuster has run the business ever since.
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy dislike each other on sight and spend the novel being wrong. Austen wrote conversation better than anyone in English, and readers return to it their whole lives.
The Dark Side of the Moon
They asked people around the studio questions on cue cards and used the answers. It then stayed on the American chart for fourteen years.
Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood has never been crueler about itself: Louis B. Mayer told Wilder he had disgraced the industry, which is the highest praise the film could possibly have received.
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Garfunkel's voice climbing a gospel staircase, the last verse arriving like the cavalry.
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
Bernini staged the saint's own account of her vision as theater, lit from a window he hid above and watched by marble spectators in boxes.
Madame Bovary
Emma Bovary reads romances, takes lovers, and runs up debts trying to feel something in a provincial town. Flaubert weighed every sentence, and modern fiction's idea of style begins with him.
Stayin' Alive
Barry Gibb's falsetto over a drum loop so metronomic that paramedics still use it to time chest compressions.
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Everyone learned how to make a sequel from this: the pressure builds for two hours, the tone stays darker than anyone expected, and one line near the close rearranged a generation's childhood.
Parthenon Sculptures (Elgin Marbles)
The goddesses of the east pediment wear drapery so wet it clings. Elgin took the marbles to London in 1801 and Greece wants them back.
The Great Gatsby
Gatsby throws enormous parties hoping the woman he loved will wander into one. Fitzgerald made the Jazz Age America's myth of itself, and the last page is the most beautiful in American writing.
The Velvet Underground & Nico
Andy Warhol's only real production instruction was to leave the mistakes in. It sold badly enough that the band were dropped soon afterwards.
Hunters in the Snow
Three hunters come home over the hill with one thin catch while villagers skate below. Bruegel painted it for a series on the months.
Gimme Shelter
Merry Clayton's voice cracking on "murder" is the sound of the sixties ending, mid-take, in one syllable.
Bust of Nefertiti
One eye is inlaid and the other left blank, which suggests the bust was a master model kept in the sculptor's workshop at Amarna.
Mass in B minor
Bach assembled it late in life partly from music he had written decades earlier, and never heard the whole thing performed in his lifetime.
Chinatown
Screenwriters still take this one apart scene by scene to see how it works: Towne and Polanski built a mystery about stolen water that ends without a shred of mercy.
Beloved
Sethe escaped slavery years ago and cannot escape the daughter she lost, who comes back to the house as a young woman. Morrison writes American history's worst chapter with unbearable tenderness.
Born to Run
Months of wall-of-sound overdubs poured into one getaway car, and every word still sounds like escape.
Liberty Leading the People
Liberty carries the tricolor over the barricade with a boy waving pistols beside her, painted within months of the revolution it shows.
The Waste Land
April is the cruellest month, and from that line Eliot assembles a ruined Europe out of voices, tarot cards, and pub talk. The fragments lodge in the memory for good.
Some Like it Hot
American comedy has never been funnier, and the Legion of Decency was appalled: Wilder ran a single disguise for two hours without ever letting the joke thin out.
OK Computer
Recorded in a fifteenth-century mansion the band rented from an actress, with one track narrated entirely by the computer voice on a Macintosh.
Macbeth
Witches promise a soldier the crown, and he and his wife murder their way to it. Shakespeare's shortest tragedy moves like a nightmare, and the guilt arrives before the blood dries.
The Third of May 1808
A lantern lights a man in a white shirt throwing his arms wide before the firing squad. Goya painted it six years later.
The Sound of Silence
A folk flop until a producer secretly overdubbed electric guitars, and the duo heard their number one on the radio.
There Will Be Blood
Day-Lewis builds an American monster out of oil and resentment, and Jonny Greenwood's score scrapes at the nerves for two and a half hours without once letting up.
Stand By Me
That four-note bassline, a gospel hymn turned into a promise, and one of the warmest vocals ever recorded.
Confessions
Augustine addresses God directly, confessing the stolen pears, the years of lust, and a prayer for chastity but not yet. Sixteen centuries on, his self-examination still cuts deeper than modern memoir.
Isenheim Altarpiece
Christ's body hangs green and pocked with sores, painted for a hospital whose patients saw their own ravaged flesh.
5th Symphony
Four notes, then half an hour that never lets up. It premiered in an under-rehearsed, freezing four-hour concert that nobody enjoyed.
In the Mood for Love
Longing has never been filmed better than this: Wong Kar-wai gets more out of a stairwell and one repeated waltz than most directors manage with an entire script.
Blonde on Blonde
The Nashville session men sat around for hours while Dylan finished writing. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was cut at four in the morning.
Stairway to Heaven
Eight minutes that climb from recorders to Page's solo, never released as a single and never needing to be.
The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu, a lady at the Japanese imperial court, wrote a thousand pages about a prince, his loves, and his decline, reaching a psychological depth Europe would not manage for six hundred years.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Hokusai was in his seventies when he made this, using a Prussian blue newly imported from Europe, with Fuji small and calm in the trough.
The Rite of Spring
Noise from the 1913 premiere audience drowned out the orchestra, so Nijinsky stood in the wings shouting the counts at his dancers.
Rear Window
Suspense has never been constructed more purely, and the real subject is the audience: Hitchcock traps you in one room with a man who cannot stop watching his neighbors.
Be My Baby
Hal Blaine's four-beat drum intro is the most imitated in pop, and Ronnie Spector owns everything after it.
The Thinker
Rodin first made this figure as Dante brooding over the Gates of Hell, then enlarged him and set him thinking alone on a rock.
I Heard it Through the Grapevine
Motown shelved Gaye's version for over a year; it came out sounding like paranoia set to a Funk Brothers groove.
Essays
Montaigne wrote short pieces on friendship, fear, sleep, and his kidney stones, and invented the essay doing it. As company on the page he remains unmatched in four centuries.