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.