A young audience, an impressive schedule, and a woman president: the 140-year-old Shanghai Symphony Orchestra is very much of the moment

By David Belcher

The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra has blossomed much like its home city, which has evolved from a key port during the Opium Wars to dazzling colonial outpost, to besieged wartime center, to a megalopolis of 24 million. When the orchestra’s 140th anniversary opens this weekend, it won’t be a Geritol-fueled tux-and-gown-fest. More than half the Chinese classical music audience is thought to be under 40, which is a reflection of Shanghai itself, a place where the future seems to have already found its footing—yet another magnet for the disposable income drenching China these days. READ ON

No platform is better suited for letting candidates bypass the hokey rituals of retail campaigning than the humble, motley podcast

By James Wolcott

On June 3, 1992, presidential aspirant Bill Clinton, wearing cool-daddy shades and a groovy tie and wielding a mighty sax, opened The Arsenio Hall Show with a squawky version of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel”—it drove the studio audience crazy-pants. Having mortified himself as keynote speaker at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, when he jabbered at such length that his wrap-up words “In closing … ” were greeted with mocking cheers, Clinton let his yakety sax do the talking, making it known that Elvis was in the building. READ ON

By Roger Copeland

Merce Cunningham was one of the three most influential choreographers of the 20th century. (The other two were George Balanchine and Martha Graham.) He choreographed nearly 200 works of modern dance between 1944 and his death, in 2009, fundamentally redefining the genre of modern dance for the second half of the century. This year marks the centennial of his birth, and classic Cunningham dances are being performed all over the world. One performance stands out: the double bill of Beach Birds and Biped at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C. READ ON

The 18th-century British painter was the “Liverpudlian Leonardo,” revered for his portraits of racehorses and other creatures

By Rachel Campbell Johnston

Do you think you know George Stubbs? You have probably seen his horses parading like proud supermodels around the drawing rooms of England’s grandest homes. This 18th-century painter, with a passion for anatomy and an eye for the racecourse, has claimed a place in our canon as the purveyor of polished equine portraits to the British aristocracy.

This, to an extent, is the Stubbs whom you are going to have the pleasure of meeting in the MK Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition. Several of the artist’s most-loved images will be travelling to Milton Keynes, the highlight being his crowd-pulling Whistlejacket, on rare loan from the National Gallery. This life-size portrait READ ON

In 1972, Andy Warhol added a series of paintings of Chairman Mao to his ever growing gallery of icons, and his irreverent blend of mythology and mass marketing caught a big political shift. (President Nixon made his historic visit to China earlier that year.) Fourteen years later, in his final series before his death, Warhol pulled another figurehead of Communism—Vladimir Lenin—into what had become a fully fleshed-out Pop ideology. READ ON

By Laura Jacobs

Intersection. The word is a perfect fit for JR, the French-born photographer who started out as a teenage graffiti artist, switched to a camera, began pasting large (and largely illegal) photographs on walls all over the world, and then, inspired by Diego Rivera’s murals, developed into a roving portraitist of cities and their citizens. Working at the intersection of photography, street art, and the impromptu happening, JR pounds the pavement, collecting passersby for group portraits. When he has enough of these portraits he digitally collages them into one epic work—an intersection, you might say, of urban diversity and commonality, an open-air choir in soaring shades of gray. READ ON

The American artist who takes inspiration from female courtroom villains—and their outfits

By Andrea Whittle

In a shallow windowed storefront in London’s Piccadilly Circus underground station, a whirl of clothes are flying in a continuous loop behind a dressing screen, as if an unseen cartoon character were rampaging through a wardrobe. Painted on each of the screen’s five panels are neo-classical arrangements decorated with ribbons, palm fronds, and other seemingly incongruous items: American Express cards, a matchbook from the five-star Marrakech hotel La Mamounia, the New York County Supreme Court building. Look closely at the clothes flapping through the spotlight and you might notice that one of them is a snakeskin-print dress, another a standard-issue khaki prison-uniform shirt. READ ON

This month, a number of exhibitions pay tribute to those artists that died too young

By Laura Jacobs

We want our artists to grow old, because their journeys inform our own. It isn’t just the body of work—the first historic strokes and sparks to the last autumnal musings, wise yet also light with liberation. The arc of the life itself is instructive. This year, the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death, has seen numerous facets of the master’s work celebrated in exhibitions all over the world. At the same time, we are reminded of Rembrandt’s compelling trajectory: a steep climb to fame and fortune, a perilous drop out of fashion. Refusing to flatter the powers that be, his work grew only more profound. There is a lesson in that. READ ON

Tim Walker, one of fashion’s most talented eccentrics, reflects on his smashing new show at the V&A

By Vassi Chamberlain

Punks, drag queens, mods, men wearing dresses (or almost nothing at all), bra-less girls in men’s suits with severe bobs, tattoos, piercings, unctuous flesh and layers of tulle, pink hair, blue hair, who-gives-a-fuck hair—this is the scene on a recent evening at Annabel’s, London’s smartest members club, on the night of photographer Tim Walker’s after-party following the opening of “Wonderful Things,” his triumphant new show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Amid all this flamboyance and peacocking stands Walker in a custom Stefano Pilati skirt-suit (one of five commissioned for the launch), with his co-host, British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, by his side. It could be a READ ON

As former lead singer and artistic mainspring of the band Talking Heads, David Byrne has come a far piece from the hallowed squalor of CBGB’s, where he and his fellow Heads entered the lion’s den of punk in their Lacoste tops and boating shoes and conquered all doubters. Once a jittery, jangly Anthony Perkins type, today a genial snow-haired gent, Byrne has achieved grandmaster status as a multi-creative: film director (True Stories, a quirky cult favorite achieving canon status last year with the Criterion Collection’s reissue on DVD and Blu-Ray), dance composer (The Catherine Wheel), pop musical inventor (Here Lies READ ON

By Patricia Zohn

Nineteen-year-old Ossip Zadkine, from a family of Smolensk boat builders, arrived in Paris in 1909 with a pipe, a Webster’s dictionary, a copy of The Lives of Great Men, and a suitcase filled with vivid memories of his native Russian forests. “I entered into a lifelong marriage with the vertical column of a pine tree trunk,” he would later say about his quest to tease movement, poetry, and philosophy from the beloved wood that had surrounded him as a boy. READ ON

By Vivian Ducat

Betye Saar, the ever photogenic high priestess of politically potent assemblage sculpture, is still at work in her Hollywood Hills studio. At 93, after almost 50 years of exhibiting her art, Saar is finally ready to reveal the scaffolding that underlies her creative process—her sketchbooks. These small spiral-bound records of her trips and inspirations also chronicle the multi-year evolution of her ideas for particular pieces. READ ON

By Mary Cargill

Marius Petipa’s ballet of 1877, La Bayadère, was unknown in the West before the 1960s. But once it got out of the Soviet Union, this exotic extravaganza set in ancient India—where the good girl gets eternity and the bad girl gets fouettés—joined the canon, anchored by the iridescent “Kingdom of the Shades,” a passage of pristine geometry in which the hero, stoked by opium, sees the image of his dead beloved multiplying ad infinitum. READ ON

Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, and the complicated truth about band—and Band—dynamics

By Bill Flanagan

The mythology of rock bands is full of contradictions, which have become fixed as the core audience for rock music has aged from adolescence to adulthood and now into old age. Many of the great bands balance two archetypes—for instance, the cerebral Pete Townshend and the working-class tough guy Roger Daltrey in the Who, or sunny blond flower child Robert Plant and dark-haired occultist Jimmy Page in Led Zeppelin. This allows self-serious fans to reject one while expressing devotion to the other. It is not uncommon to hear baby-boomers of a certain disposition say they can’t stand Mick Jagger, but they love the Rolling Stones because of Keith Richards. Fill in Bono and the Edge, or Paul McCartney and John Lennon. READ ON

By Eshaan Jain

For 35 years starting in 1928, the 4472 Flying Scotsman hauled passengers between London and Edinburgh. The daily express train worked eight-hour shifts nonstop, became the first locomotive to officially break 100 m.p.h., and even ferried soldiers and supplies during W.W. II. Through its vigor and ferocity, this eight-wheeled workhorse earned the nickname “the Most Famous Train in the World.” This month, Dreweatts, of the U.K., will auction a gauge-1 model of the Flying Scotsman. It’s only 28 inches long, but details like the fluted motion, fitted steps, handrails, and vacuum hoses make this a worthy replica. (dreweatts.com)

Artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn brings his newest series of unforgettable portraits to the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills

By Michael Hainey

It’s not surprising that Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s painting style features fractured faces. Growing up in a Chicago housing project in the 1980s, his talent was recognized early and he earned a scholarship to a boarding school, where he focused on art. During that first semester away from home, his mother died. (As a tribute, he assumed her name as his middle name.) When he returned for Thanksgiving break, he found the family apartment empty. Not only were all his family’s possessions gone, but so were his father and four siblings. To this day, he has not seen any of them. READ ON

Abba morphs from musical to interactive dinner theater

By Martin Hemming

Bjorn Ulvaeus, the second-hairiest member of Abba, has agreed to grant The Sunday Times an interview on one condition: we serve him lunch. Not buy him lunch; a songwriter worth $300 million by some estimates hardly needs a freebie. But to physically bring him food and put it down in front of him.

So here I am, nervously hurrying over to Ulvaeus’s table, in waiter’s waistcoat and pinny, bearing taramasalata, tzatziki, roasted red pepper hummus and a selection of olives. We’re in Nikos’s taverna on the Greek island of Skopelos. Except we’re not really. We’re actually in London’s O2 READ ON

With Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge has caught lightning in a bottle. When someone hits with such a seismic wallop, it’s both a miracle and a mystery. Why now? Why her?

By John Lahr

Roseanne used to end her stand-up act this way: “People say to me, ‘You’re not very feminine.’ Well, they can suck my dick.” Phallic fun used to be the province of men—a mission broadcast by the totemic Fool in cap and bells, whose scepter is actually a penis, that emblem of transgression, the source of panic and elation. In earlier, primmer days, the great American comediennes—Fanny Brice, Judy Holiday, Lucille Ball—got away with mischief by ditzy indirection; nowadays, in our unabashed, newly liberated times that echo with the impudence of independence, when facing down the male gaze, comediennes increasingly prefer the headbutt to the velvet glove. READ ON

By Lance Esplund

“He can paint anything,” Erasmus of Rotterdam said of Albrecht Dürer, the painter, printmaker, typographer, inventor, and art theorist who brought the High Renaissance from the South to the North. “Even things one cannot paint—fire, sun rays, thunder, electric storms, lightning, and banks of fog … the whole human soul as revealed in the body’s form, and almost even the voice itself.” READ ON

By Andrea Whittle

When Peggy Guggenheim moved to Venice, in 1948, the city wasn’t the floating playground for contemporary art that it is today. No billionaires had parked their collections there, no blue-chip sales directors were spending the Biennale preview week working up a sweat on the Bauer Hotel dance floor. In that year of ’48, with the entire European continent slowly recovering from the Second World War and Greece embroiled in a civil war, Guggenheim was invited to show her collection at the Greek Pavilion of the exhibition. READ ON

“What’s your tribe?” The question made me gulp my tequila soda. It came from a 30-ish banker, clad in a gold-beaded kimono and sunglasses. We were at a techno party, on a Friday night in New York City. He was asking, of course, which camp I had attended at Burning Man. If the camp wasn’t $10,000 a week—or worse, if I hadn’t even been there—he’d be on to the next. You can find people like him in any of the world’s ‘hipster’ destinations—not into the music, but can’t wait to post that gram in a kimono at sound meditation in Tulum. READ ON

The thrill that people seek in dance clubs is not photographable—the merging of bodily and planetary forces, a moment that feels breathlessly eternal. Hunger for this thrill exploded in Berlin when the Wall came down in 1989 and the brio of a 900-year-old city, stifled for generations, let loose again. It was especially palpable in the dance venues that sprang up at the time—Tresor, Ufo, Planet—which not only no longer exist but now seem, to those of us who remember them, too ecstatic ever to have existed.

“It was a special time,” says curator Felix Hoffmann, who came to Berlin READ ON

By Andrea Whittle

The art of Lina Iris Viktor revolves around blackness: the color, the pigment, Africa’s complex colonial legacy, a state of being. She strips it down to midnight darkness; she adorns it with gold; she veils and eroticizes it with screens. “Some Are Born to Endless Night: Dark Matter”—opening next week at Autograph, a gallery in London’s Hackney neighborhood—is Viktor’s first major solo show in the U.K. READ ON

By Nicholas Fox Weber

Georgia Russell carved her reputation by cutting up photographs and books. She thrilled audiences in 2015 when she moved to canvas, positioning one painting over another, slitting the one in front to reveal—in the voids created with her scalpel—the second canvas pulsing behind it. Now, in a different form of breakthrough, Russell has nearly relinquished her weapon. READ ON