Opinion

Why is the figure of the witch and magical practice making a 21st-century comeback in the arts?

After a five-year redevelopment of the landmark heritage site on Calton Hill, who will this ‘new kind of observatory’ be for?

At the Royal Academy of Arts, an exhibition spans the histories of the Pacific

From capitalist realism to acid communism, new anthology K-Punk demonstrates the reach of the late writer’s cultural criticism

An exhibition at MoMu, Antwerp, spotlights the largely female ‘Textielgroep’ from the 1970s hanging their work alongside contemporary practitioners

A recent spate of TV shows set in Missouri show the state as a cultural imaginary on the fault line of US political debate

From 14th-century frescos in Siena to a refugee camp in Greece, Astra Taylor's new documentary examines the corrosion of electoral politics

The reputation of the Crown Prince is now unsalvageable, with talk of Saudi ‘reform’ reduced to an international joke

An altercation between a White House correspondent and the president becomes a visual question: what is it that we see?

From imperial jewels to a miniature sarcophagus, this chamber of curiosities at the Kunsthistorisches Museum mixes fastidiousness with kitsch

With the current Anni Albers show at Tate Modern marking a resurgence in textiles, charting the changing perceptions of fabrics throughout art history

What many call a national movement is far from it: the price for people to tell their stories remains too high

At the Photographers’ Gallery in London, a show examining the increasingly ubiquitous images produced by machines

Monrovia, Indiana, a folksy, novelistic tale of white America, plays somewhere between documentary, cliché and ghost story

An exhibition at Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, timed to coincide with the Yalta European Strategy conference, reminds of the corruptibility of culture

At Manchester Art Gallery, an exhibition brings attention to how the selected ‘highlights’ of a collection tell a deeper story of erasure 

Many of the streaming giant's curated playlists complicate Western obsessions with ‘world’ and ‘exotic’ music

The second edition – Michael Dean, Mona Hatoum, Phillip Lai, Magali Reus and Cerith Wyn Evans – pits old guard against young guns

Bolsonaro’s repeated insults towards women, people of colour and the LGBT community, should have been enough to derail his campaign – it wasn’t

Beyond the ‘forcefield of righteousness’ that occludes some political work, ‘Artes Mundi 8’ manages a complicated and rewarding show