Art Deco

For Your Pleasure

For Your Pleasure is Roxy Music’s second studio album, released in March 1973. It was recorded in February 1973 at AIR Studios in Oxford Circus, London. Roxy Music self-produced it with Chris Thomas; John Middleton and John Punter handled audio engineering. The band spent more studio time on this album than on their debut, integrating Bryan Ferry’s songs with more elaborate production treatments. The title track ends with an elaborate fade-out using tape loop effects. Amanda Lear, Ferry’s girlfriend at the time, was photographed with a black jaguar for the front cover, while Ferry appears on the back cover as a dapper chauffeur standing behind a limousine. It marked the beginning of Roxy Music’s long, successful collaboration with producer Chris Thomas. It was promoted with the non-album single 'Pyjamarama'. It is the final Roxy Music album to feature Brian Eno, who departed soon after the supporting tour ended.

Anselm

Wim Wenders’ 2023 documentary Anselm is a 3D portrait of German artist Anselm Kiefer, filmed over three years across Germany, France, and Italy. Eschewing biography and exposition, it renders Kiefer’s creative process — burning canvases, photographing ruins, building towers from rubble — through sustained, tactile 6K 3D imagery. Staged sequences with younger actors echo Kiefer’s life across decades, while poetry by Paul Celan and archival footage anchor the film in postwar German reckoning. The result is less a film about art than an attempt to make cinema behave like painting: slow, material, heavy with time.

Basquiat

Julian Schnabel’s 1996 directorial debut is a biographical film about Jean-Michel Basquiat, starring Jeffrey Wright and David Bowie as Warhol. Made without access to Basquiat’s actual artwork, it relies on stylistic approximation and a self-reflexive script co-written by Schnabel and Lech Majewski. The film traces Basquiat’s rapid ascent and decline in 1980s New York, foregrounding his relationship with Warhol and his struggle with addiction. Its strength lies in texture and restraint; its limitation, in the narrowing of Basquiat’s voice, politics and heritage to fit Schnabel’s personal elegy.

Mural Murals

Agnès Varda’s 1981 documentary Mur Murs observes the painted walls of Los Angeles, focusing on Chicano-led muralism in working-class neighbourhoods. Shot on location with minimal intervention, it pairs static images of murals with layered narration and interviews, treating walls as sites of communal memory and political expression. The film avoids exposition, instead trusting texture, duration, and specificity to convey meaning.

The Horse's Mouth

Ronald Neame’s 1958 adaptation of Joyce Cary’s novel stars Alec Guinness as Gulley Jimson, a chaotic, indomitable painter who treats London as his canvas and everyone in it as raw material. Written by Guinness, shot in Technicolor by Arthur Ibbetson, and edited with restless precision by Anne V. Coates, it is a performance-driven, physically urgent portrait of creation as compulsion — flawed in its simplifications, but unforgettable in its energy.

Trouble in Paradise

Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 romantic comedy follows a gentleman thief and a lady pickpocket who con a perfume magnate — only to find themselves entangled in genuine feeling. With Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, and Kay Francis, it sustains a tone of poised, knowing irony, using Art Deco design, precise editing, and understated performance to explore class, consent, and value as performance. Made before strict enforcement of the Production Code, it relies on implication over exposition and rewards attention to gesture, timing, and spatial relationships.

Uncle Janco

Agnès Varda’s 1967 documentary Uncle Janco observes Romanian-born sculptor Marcel Janco in his Paris studio over 22 minutes. With no narration, no interviews, and no contextual framing, the film rests on sustained observation: Janco’s speech, his handling of materials, and the quiet rhythm of his daily practice. It is a study in presence, not biography — a work that values tactile knowledge and embodied memory over exposition or historical positioning.

Loving Vincent

A postman's reluctant son delivers Vincent van Gogh's last letter a year after the painter's suicide and, meeting the people who knew him in his final weeks, starts doubting the official account of how he died. Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's Loving Vincent is the first fully painted animated feature, built from oil paintings made in Van Gogh's own technique over sixty-five thousand hand-shot frames, a six-year production that treats the investigation plot mainly as scaffolding for its visual project.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Memphis Group

The Memphis Group was a short-lived but decisive intervention: a collective rejection of Modernist austerity, built on accessible materials, shared drawing, and irreverent references. Its durability lies not in longevity but in how precisely it named the limits of ‘good taste’ — then stepped past them.

Art Deco

Art Nouveau

Chrysler Building

The Chrysler Building is a 1,046-foot-tall steel-framed brick skyscraper in New York City, designed by William Van Alen in the Art Deco style and completed in 1930. Van Alen used Nirosta stainless steel—the first such use in an American project—as an integral design element. He secretly built a 125-foot spire inside the frame and assembled it in 90 minutes on October 23, 1929. The building served as a real-world test site for stainless steel durability, with formal inspections every five years from 1929 to 1960. It became the world’s tallest building for 11 months and remains the tallest steel-framed brick building in the world. Critics responded with mixed reactions—including praise for Van Alen personally and criticism of the building as superficial and lacking serious design significance.

Empire State Building

The Empire State Building is a 102-storey Art Deco skyscraper in New York City. It was the first building over 100 stories tall. It held the title of world’s tallest building from 1931 until 1970.

Streamline Moderne

BioShock

BioShock is a first-person shooter with role-playing customisation and stealth elements. You play as silent protagonist Jack, guided through Rapture toward objectives. You battle enemies using traditional weapons and plasmids—magic-like superpowers that consume EVE and can unlock new areas. Weapons are upgraded at scattered stations and fitted with varied ammo. Health is tracked and restored with consumables. Plasmids grant superpowers like fire or electricity, and can unlock new areas by melting ice or tripping locks. Using plasmids requires EVE, replenished via hypos or consumable food and drink. The player has a health meter that decreases when they take damage and can restore it with food or medical packs found throughout Rapture.

Cultural movement

Stencil graffiti

Young British Artists

Royal Academy of Arts

Turner Prize

Contemporary art

Minimalism

Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic

The Atlantic was one of the best-known bodies on the Bugatti Type 57S and 57SC. It was based on Jean Bugatti's 1935 Aérolithe concept, and the dorsal seam that began as a riveting method became its signature.

Talbot-Lago T150-C SS

The Talbot-Lago T150C SS Teardrop Coupe is a 1936 Figoni & Falaschi-bodied car commissioned by Antonio Lago to revive the Talbot marque. Its teardrop form was among the most aerodynamic of its era—and the most frequently specified for the Lago-SS. It established no new chassis or engine architecture, but it did establish a visual language for speed that resonated at concours and auction alike.

Nissan Figaro

The Nissan Figaro is a 1991 Japanese-market, right-hand-drive, fixed-profile convertible built by Aichi Machine Industry (later Pike Factory) on the first-generation Nissan March/Micra platform. It is one of four Pike cars, conceived as part of a design strategy borrowed from personal electronics marketing.