It all began with a dreamt trip to Mars.

Jay Scheib, a stage director and professor who heads the theater arts program at MIT, was told by a student of his that she planned to be the first person on Mars. When he found out that a one-way mission to...

Portraits are back. Not that photographers ever stopped shooting people, but the pendulum that cyclically favors, say, formalist geometries or landscape over revealed persona, has swung back in full force this year. At least that was the takeaway at Paris Photo, the world's top photography gathering. Now in its 16th...

Art fairs, with exceptions like Documenta, have come to be judged in terms of money: What mega-sales were murmured down the aisles, to which high-profile collector or museum, and what might it all say about the state of the economy. At FIAC 2012 (the French acronym for the International Contemporary...

French media artist Maurice Benayoun is way ahead of today's economists. He long ago figured out that collective emotions trackable on the Web might be used to predict market ups and downs. Recent books like Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy echo the notion that the market has...

When Dominique Mercy first met Pina Bausch, at the 1971 Saratoga Summer Dance Festival, they could scarcely communicate. But although neither knew the other's language at the time, they would go on to develop a vocabulary of movement so expressive and groundbreaking that Bausch's Wuppertaler Tanztheater would one day win...

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was the kind of artist who could turn a ravaging addiction to opium, or the death of a lover, into masterpieces of literature and graphic art. An astonishingly versatile creator (poet, filmmaker, novelist, designer, playwright), Cocteau remains on the shortlist of canonized geniuses in a...

If you've ever been to Paris Photo, the most important international photography art fair in the galaxy, you might want to bypass what I write here and go straight to the videos of gallerists talking up their wares (below), because I'll bore you with the enthusiasm of the newly initiated.

How does one credibly portray the greatest rock 'n' roll band of all time without benefit of their recorded music? In 1994, British director Iain Softley released Backbeat, with Ian Hart as John Lennon, Stephen Dorff as Stuart Sutcliffe (Lennon's best friend and a fleeting band member), and Sheryl Lee...

At last year's FIAC -- Paris' post-Frieze international art fair -- I spoke with dealers about economic health and buying trends in the art market. But by now, everyone pretty much knows the score: the art market has pulled itself back from the precipice of the 2008 downturn and seems...

London's Frieze Art Fair, in its 8th year, is one brash trumpet in a symphony (or is it a cacophony?) of international cities that are clearly gaining ground on New York in nurturing top artists and dealers, and attracting major collectors. Held every October in Regent's Park, this year it...

Google is the engine that keeps on giving. A while back, the colossus of search gave us its master plan of digitizing every book in the world, with the express purpose of making all written knowledge, wisdom and diversion accessible to anyone with a web connection. Earlier this year, as...

It's not every day that a journalist becomes part of a work of art. In a stroke of autobiographical fervor a few years ago Christian Boltanski had sold the rights to his daily life to a wealthy collector, who installed 24/7 live cameras all over his studio at the southern...

Surrealism is eternal. The quaintly comical provocations of the original Surrealist gang of the 1920s have been so absorbed into high and low culture -- particularly film and fashion -- that we revisit its roots with a reverence both mock and real. Paris-based photographer Bettina Rheims, whom some have called...

For 10 years, David Schwimmer made you chuckle as earnest, feckless Ross on Friends. But in his second outing as a film director, Trust, he will infuriate you and make you cringe -- especially if you're attempting to parent a teenager. Unlikely as this shape-shift seems, Schwimmer in real life...

20 years ago, Yann Arthus-Bertrand managed an animal reserve in France and decided to take his wife to see the lions at Kenya's Masai Mara Reserve. Taking photographs of the lions, to study their behavior, changed his life. An avid hot-air balloonist, he began shooting from great heights and eventually...

The Euro is spiking again, and so is Paris' reputation as a crucial destination for both casual art pilgrims and serious collectors. Its pedigree as the cradle of Modern art is forever assured, but in recent years the buzz of contemporary art has been elsewhere--Berlin, London, Shanghai. However, there was...

Today we take it for granted when seeing graffiti art in a posh gallery, but arguably the first artist to channel the urban street frequencies of his time and get it onto the "white walls with white people with white wine" was Jean-Michel Basquiat.

If Robert Duvall has a favorite flavor of acting, it's Southern discomfort. From Tender Mercies to The Apostle, he has always had a knack for inhabiting the souls of fierce men with flinty drawls and haunted pasts. In Get Low, Duvall gets to create his most artful codger, Felix Bush,...

If director Phillip Noyce is to be believed, certain human experiments conducted in the last dark days of the KGB are beginning to hatch, and the recent bust of 11 suspected Russian spies is just the tip of a sinister iceberg. In Salt, Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, an unstoppable...

What would happen if Gustav Mahler, paralyzed by despair over his cheating wife, had sought out the help of Sigmund Freud in 1910 Vienna? German director Percy Adlon, best known for his quirky desert parable Bagdad Cafe, conjured it with his son Felix in Mahler On The Couch. This fever...