Humanities and Arts news

From Peruvian healers battling sorcerers to Chinese executives seeking financial success, ayahuasca’s power shifts across worlds

- by Alex K Gearin

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In this mesmerising short from 1991, thousands of Japanese newspaper clippings form a prescient vision of our digital world

- by Aeon Video

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Who belongs to our moral community? The Greek philosopher Empedocles had an answer: all life, from humans to the laurel bush

- by Tristan Moyle

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The gravest of all decisions, to go to war, happens without the consent of the people. This is a great flaw in democracy

- by Vincenza Falletti

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What is love to you? An artist focuses on the hands and gestures of his subjects as they reflect on this boundless question

- by Aeon Video

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This life-giving element, stored in rock and organic material, moves around Earth in an ancient cycle we have just broken

- by Jack Lohmann

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An animated interpretation of the story of the Indigenous people kidnapped from Tierra del Fuego and brought to England in 1830

- by Aeon Video

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Acute inflammation helps the body heal. But chronic inflammation is different and could provoke a medical paradigm shift

- by Amy K McLennan

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Exoplanet discoveries have reshaped astronomy. Are exomoons next? Brian Greene in conversation with David Kipping

- by Aeon Video

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Our cursed age of self-monitoring and optimisation didn’t start with big tech: as so often, the Victorians are to blame

- by Elena Mary

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Shop now and save on gifts for artists of all ages and skill levels.

With the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, the Bearden Foundation is compiling a digital catalogue raisonné for the artist.

The offerings run the gamut from a Basquiat drawings survey to a Tracey Emin retrospective.

Recommendations for your activist auntie, your S.T.E.A.M.-y sister, and your funky uncle.

Odd views on ordinary things are Larsen’s signature.

Among the top lots are a portrait titled "Arnout Tholinx, Inspector" (circa 1656), which has a high estimate of £2.5 million.

The Swedish activist and 35 other protestors were banned from Venice for 48 hours as a result.

“He’s blended different states of time together,” said the show's curator.

Pictures by Paul Strand, Walker Evans, and Jacob Riis get at the medium's existential contradictions.

Pictorum Art Group was dissolved in July. Artists and ex-employees are struggling to get paid.

This month brought a mix of sharp brand thinking, cultural nostalgia, and some much-needed clarity in crowded markets. From workplace art to whiskey cans dipped in '80s gold, here are the projects...

A handpicked list of brilliant independents across the UK. If you're buying gifts this year, here are the shops worth supporting and the people who make them special. It's Small Business Saturday...

The London studio has introduced a refined, emotionally driven identity for the British furniture maker, shifting the story from pure function to the feeling of living with cleverly engineered, bea...

Fresh grotesques challenge Helvetica's dominance, whilst experimental systems explore collective authorship, architectural inspiration, and the fluid boundaries between serif and sans. As we appro...

The Belfast studio designed everything from logo to lighting for Birch Cabins. And the results speak to the power of multidisciplinary thinking. There's a particular kind of coherence that only co...

Ireland might be a small nation, but it connected up some pretty significant global networks last week. Here's what that means for designers across Ireland, the UK and beyond. When a young Indian,...

Insiders' #IgnoredByInsta campaign was designed to expose Instagram's failure to protect users whose accounts were hacked. Instead, it has become a story about censorship, corporate fear, and the p...

The award-winning creative director discusses why he's starting something fresh, what he learned building Franklyn, and why the new studio is named after his son. When we interviewed graphic desig...

The new identity is built on the idea of cultivation, using a floral-led visual system and a global creative team to reflect its role in nurturing careers across the design industry. Design recrui...

Here Design has built a reputation for thoughtful, craft-led branding that feels as good as it looks, with their philosophy of "beautility" shaping everything they put into the world. You'd find i...

The popularity of meditation and mindfulness apps doesn’t seem to be related to a new era of Aquarius or a sudden deep awareness of our bodies, but instead a cry for help to survive the overload of tasks and information. →

CD – 901 Editions

Vittorio Guindani, whose CV includes collaborations with various contemporary dance companies and artists working in many different areas, released his debut album Jisei on 901 Editions in 2020. He returns once again on Fabio Perletta’s label →

Tehnički muzej Nikola Tesla, catalogue, ISBN 978-9536568895, English, 224 pages, 2022, Croatia

If ‘New Tendencies’ is the most famous historical movement of media art and culture that originated in Zagreb, then Croatia has a →

One of the essential qualities of Andreas Zingerle and Linda Kronman’s artworks is to unpack systems that we take for granted, unveiling their unsettling mechanisms. And they don’t just describe these mechanisms, but often embody them. This is the case →

CD – Kohlhaas

Alessandro Bosetti, a sound artist originally from Milan and currently based in Marseille, has built his research on an alchemy of fragments. Always fascinated by the metamorphosis of digital archives into musical scores, Bosetti weaves hidden correspondences →

University of Alabama Press, ISBN 978-0817321864, English, 194 pages, 2024, USA

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘control society’ is often cited to describe our technological condition of being tracked and recorded in all activities that →

Considered to be among the very first computational generative visual processes, cellular automata has historically represented a pioneering form of endless computer graphics featuring machine logic. As a long time artist engaging with the aesthetic of the ‘imaginaries of the →

CD – Persistence of Sound

Rubbish Music is a project that brings together two central figures in sound experimentation: Kate Carr, a sound artist specializing in field recording, and Iain Chamber, an academic active in the fields of anthropology, sociology →

Institute of Network Cultures, ISBN 978-9083328287, English, 155 pages, 2024, The Netherlands

There is a lively and vibrant underground scene around the world of people digitising publications and other analogue material, and sharing the files →

By surfing online or using digital entertainment services, we subject ourselves to a dense set of algorithms that propose content to us. Whether it’s the order in which we view the results of a search engine, the movies that are →

Open letter urges Labor to reverse JRG scheme, introduced by Coalition in 2021, as cost of humanities degrees reaches more than $50,000

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Tim Winton knows what it’s like to be the first in a family to go to university – “what a breakthrough that is, the kind of opportunities it provides”.

It was at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, studying arts, that he wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, launching a four-decade writing career.

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The future of public knowledge rests on building open-access LLMs driven by ethics rather than profit, writes Prof Dr Matteo Valleriani

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly entered the landscape of historical research. Their capacity to process, annotate and generate texts is transforming scholarly workflows. Yet historians are uniquely positioned to ask a deeper question – who owns the tools that shape our understanding of the past?

Most powerful LLMs today are developed by private companies. While their investments are significant, their goals – focused on profit, platform growth or intellectual property control – rarely align with the values of historical scholarship: transparency, reproducibility, accessibility and cultural diversity.

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Jim Endersby recalls how maths teachers responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s and likens it to current fears of AI use by university students

I agree with Prof Andrew Moran and Dr Ben Wilkinson (Letters, 2 March) that cheap and easy‐to‐use AI tools create problems for universities, but the reactions of many academics to these new developments remind me of the way some people responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s.

Reports of the imminent death of maths teaching in schools proved exaggerated. Maths teachers had to adapt, not least to teach students the longstanding rule “garbage in, garbage out”; if students had no idea of the fundamental principles and ideas behind maths, they would not realise their answer was meaningless. Today’s humanities teachers are going to have to adapt in similar ways.

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Arts and humanities are being hit hardest by cuts in higher education, write Prof Thea Pitman and Prof Emma Cayley, and Dr Ronan McLaverty-Head and another letter writer comment on cuts at Cardiff and another Russell Group university

In response to the shocking news predicting up to 10,000 imminent job losses across the UK higher education sector (Quarter of leading UK universities cutting staff due to budget shortfalls, 1 February), we write to flag up a fact that the article largely misses: the degree to which arts and humanities subjects are bearing the brunt of these cuts.

While the article singles out the loss of nursing courses at Cardiff University and the closure of chemistry courses across the country, it mentions the humanities just once in passing. Last week it was ancient history, modern languages, music, religion and theology at Cardiff University. Not so long ago, it was subjects including English, history, music and theatre at Goldsmiths, and art history, music, philosophy and religious studies at the University of Kent, to name just two. And with each passing week more arts and humanities courses and departments are cut.

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With degrees disappearing and reading rates plummeting, the arts face a critical moment in education and culture

The announcement that Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent is to stop offering English literature degrees has set several hares running, most of them in the wrong direction. The university said in effect that hardly anyone wanted to study English literature at degree level any more and the course was therefore no longer viable. If you can’t do EngLit in the city of Chaucer and Marlowe, where can you do it?

Canterbury’s tale is a familiar one. EngLit is in wholesale retreat at A level, with numbers down from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023, and there has been a decline at university, too, over the past decade, though statistics are disputed because the subject gets studied at degree level in many guises, including creative writing and linguistics. Overall, humanities subjects seem to be losing their appeal, with only 38% of students taking a course in 2021/22, down from nearly 60% between 2003/4 and 2015/16.

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A New York scholar’s study of our long history of acclaiming the fool and ignoring the facts is timely and terrifically witty

This is at once a wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit. Almost every one of the short sections into which the narrative is divided – and there is a narrative, cunningly sustained within what seems a relaxed discursiveness – takes careful aim and at the end hits the bullseye with a sure and satisfying aphoristic thwock.

The central premise of the book is simply stated: “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, New York, and the author of a handful of masterly studies of the terrain where political and intellectual sensibilities collide, is an acute observer of the vagaries of human behaviour and thought in general, and of our tendency to self-delusion in particular.

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Whatever their GCSE results, students should be told the whole story: understanding languages and cultures is a huge advantage in the workplace

I reflect on GCSE results day with a sense of pride tinged with sadness. Proud because this year’s cohort achieved fantastic results, given the challenges they have faced since the pandemic, but sad because for many it will be the last time they study humanities (languages, history and religious and classical studies) subjects.

I won’t hide my bias: I studied Spanish, history and philosophy and ethics at A-level, and Latin and religious studies at GCSE, so I’m a strong advocate for the humanities. Yet, they’re steadily becoming an unpopular choice, with only 38% of students taking at least one humanities course in the 2021/22 cohort compared to just under 60% from 2003/4 to 2015/16.

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Not only will literary criticism wither, but we risk losing the campus novel entirely

Ah, A-level results week, and how weirdly enjoyable it is when you’re not doing them yourself, have no children of your own in the game, and nieces and nephews who aren’t yet old enough. Out for a walk with my headphones, I listen delightedly as a triumphant candidate appears on the BBC’s World at One: Evie from Southend, who sounds as pleased as punch. What will she do now, asks the presenter, who also has a smile in his voice. She doesn’t miss a beat. It’s all sorted. In the autumn, she’ll go to Durham University to read... English literature.

This stops me in my tracks. What? Surely everyone knows that English literature is dying. Since 2012, the number of students reading it at university, as I once did, has fallen by more than a third; staff are being laid off, departments are closing, scholarship is missing in action. I’ve just read a “major” new study of the poet WH Auden, and, as I write in my review, its gargantuan size – you could more easily slip a hardback edition of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course into your handbag than this book – announces it as a relic even before publication. No, Stem subjects are where it’s at now, and my amazement at Evie’s “passion” for her course is going to take a full circuit of the park to fade.

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Government needs to promote the study of all disciplines to improve workforce skills, says Prof Jonathan Michie

Molly Morgan Jones, the director of policy at the British Academy, is right to warn that Michael Gove’s legacy is undermining workforce skills (A-level students choosing narrower range of subjects after Gove changes, 14 August). To contribute at work, and in society more generally, requires capabilities such as critical thinking, imagination and communication alongside technical skills. Humanities and social science are therefore vital, along with science and engineering.

Countless examples illustrate this. One is Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and others broke the enemy codes, developing in the process the world’s first digital programmable computer, Colossus. Surely a time to stick to maths and engineering? No, Bletchley recruited from all academic disciplines, with entrance exams including crosswords. (Full disclosure: my father, Donald Michie, was one, diverted to Bletchley from Balliol College, Oxford, where he’d received an open entrance scholarship to study classics.)

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Academics warn loss of higher education arts and humanities courses will harm understanding of racism and imperial history

Cuts to arts and humanities subjects within higher education will have damaging implications for our understanding of race and colonialism, academics have warned.

Petitions have been launched to save anthropology at Kent University, where the subject has come under threat of closure, while Oxford Brookes confirmed the closure of its music programme earlier this year.

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