Culture

Between beer gardens and picnics: Climate Culture Care at the Ashmolean

When I returned to Oxford this term, just as England teased us with the sixth heat-wave of the year, I found myself at a loose end. With the deadline for two vacation essays still far in the distance, the sun lit up the sign for Soma Surovi Jannat’s Ashmolean Now exhibition, Climate Culture Care.

“What is a good life?”: The Standard of Living in review 

“What is a good life?” This axiological question, asked earnestly in the opening lines of James Graham’s The Standard of Living – playing at Theatre Royal Haymarket until December 12 – is often overlooked by the fractured and hyper-specialised discipline of economics.

Diverse voices: ‘Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah’ by Miljenko Jergović 

‘When he created Earth and these lands upon it, when he divided people into...

Art as protest on university campuses

CW: rape. This week, Cornell University has made headlines as prosecutors reopened an investigation into...

Mary Queen of Scots review: ‘artistic licence breathes life into history’

Rourke brings a fresh take on the fraught relationship between two women ruling in a man’s world.

Jenny Holzer at the Tate: An Exhibition for Instagram

Olya Makarova reviews Jenny Holzer's exhibition at the Tate Modern.

Pictures in the sandcastles

The artist as revolutionary is a wonderful image, and perhaps one that is forced upon creatives of our day. However, it is imperative to recall both the political power of artistic media, and the inherent ideology of created works.

Review: Frog’s Legs – ‘light-hearted façade with a dark core’

Shepherd-Cross' new play treads a fine line between offensiveness and good taste - is it all the better for it?

The Pitchfork Disney Preview – ‘a play of delight and disgust’

The Pitchfork Disney shows at the BT Studio this week

Create and destroy

“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge” Mikhail Bakunin

The Human Impulse

Investigating the social and biological imperatives behind art

Sexualisation in music: liberation or objectification?

Art and creative expression have always made up our social and sensitive nature, from telling stories, to performing primal dances, to painting scenes of human experience on cave walls.

Why do we write?

We write for ourselves, for the reader, and for wider society.  And I think that’s probably a good enough reason to write an article for Cherwell.

Enron Preview – ‘financial collapse made tangible’

A preview of the Theatre Goose and Sour Peach Productions' play at the Oxford Playhouse this week.

Projections of time: film and fashion

The importance of costumes in heralding new trends and evoking the past

Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde

The Barbican displays different kinds of ‘modern couples’ in an immersive blend of love and art

Beautiful Boy review: powerful, painful, poignant

Beautiful Boy is unlikely to have an unintentional glamorising effect. We witness the oblivion of being high before the inevitable crash down to a deeper and darker place.

Review: Antony and Cleopatra – a star-studded Shakespeare

Lawrence Li is impressed by the National Theatre’s opulent imagining of a Shakespearean classic

Hard to Be-Leave – Brexit: The Uncivil War

If you're looking for a grown up perspective on Brexit, Channel 4's political docudrama leaves much to be desired

The psychology of an evil stepmother

Is this classic archetype a thing of the past?

The anxiety of envy

"Big names dominate the industry, and yet their fiction feels incredibly same-y."

Fast Film: In a Lonely Place unites noir tradition with painfully real romance

Humphrey Bogart is a man addled by loneliness in this cinematic masterclass of subtlety and allegory.

“Look what you made me do”: Taylor Swift’s reinvention

The reinvention of her ‘reputation’ is not a change of character nor a sudden shift in her attitude to the spotlight. The Reputation era was simply a rebranding of sound, lyricism, production and image which worked to provoke her audience and, ironically, sustain her reputation.

Review: The 1975’s latest album falls short

Some robotic pretentious waffle. Some cynical love songs. Some good hooks, a few nice bridges. Rinse and repeat for an album for an identikit album, with a dozen else out there the same.

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