With period rooms and decorative props, and scents and sounds of centuries past, an immersive exhibition in Paris transports visitors from morning to night inside an 18th-century aristocratic home

By Lacey Minot

Once upon a time, before tourists waited in line for hours for hot chocolate at Angelina, before Chanel occupied Rue Cambon and the Ritz, before Van Cleef & Arpels sparkled at Place Vendôme, Saint-Honoré became the quarter of choice for Paris’s 18th-century aristocrats and luxury artisans. This neighborhood is as storied as its eponymous street is expansive. At over one mile wide, it is so densely punctuated by the monuments, houses, and collections that give Paris its alluring gravity that simply to queue up for chocolat chaud is to be immersed in its legacy. READ ON

The artist shares his go-to spots in the Thai city

Rirkrit Tiravanija has always existed between cultures. The son of a Thai diplomat, he was born in Buenos Aires in 1961 and spent his childhood between Ethiopia, Canada, and Thailand. “I actually came to art without knowing anything about art at all,” he told Flash Art, and, after enrolling at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, in 1980, quickly revealed an aversion to the exclusive culture of the gallery world. Instead, he valued accessibility.

Ten years later, with a master’s degree and a Whitney Museum residency under his belt, he created the work that would forever change the world of performance art. He presented READ ON

Meet Luca Micheletti, fourth-generation thespian, first-generation star baritone

By Matthew Gurewitsch

Straight plays, grand opera—it’s all theater, right? To a point, yes, and directors cross back and forth all the time. For the gang onstage, it’s a different story. In plays, imagination, empathy, and a sixth sense for subtext will see an actor of genius through any part. The singing actors in opera do well to use that tool kit, too—but their sine qua non is the voice.

Luca Micheletti, 40, has been playacting since his father, an actor, took him out there at age four in Giovanni Verga’s morose, verismo epic I Vinti (The Defeated). “We are heirs of READ ON

The Brazilian artist and photographer shares his go-to spots in the city he calls home

When Vik Muniz moved to New York in 1983, it was very much by chance. After being shot in the leg while breaking up a street fight in São Paulo, his hometown, he accepted a payout from the shooter in lieu of pressing charges. He used the money to fly to Chicago, worked a stint in a supermarket, and eventually saved enough to relocate to New York to open a sculpture studio. By 1989, he was staging his first solo shows, gaining acclaim for his witty, illusory style of photographing drawings and unconventional materials. His ascent was meteoric: a little more than a decade later, he was representing Brazil at the Venice Biennale. READ ON

A new London exhibition shifts the focus from the British artist’s famous paintings to his lesser-known, lifelong relationship with drawing

By Sarah Hyde

Four years after Lucian Freud’s death, in 2011, his childhood artworks, letters, and sketchbooks, filled with hundreds of drawings, were given to the British government in lieu of death duties, and the Lucian Freud Archive at the National Portrait Gallery was born. This collection provides the foundation of the exhibition “Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting,” which has just opened at the gallery. Here, we can follow Freud’s artistic journey from the brightly colored sketches of a little boy who invented a “zebra unicorn” as a dream pony to the towering figure of 20th-century British art, whose work radiates postwar ennui with a limited “Londony” palette. READ ON

The husband-and-wife team behind Esmé restaurant share their favorite places to eat in the city they call home

Jenner Tomaska first entered the world of cooking at 14, working in kitchens across the country before returning to Chicago, his hometown, to focus on fine dining. “I like to give an experience,” he once said. “Rather than consuming food, I’m more about crafting something for someone.” In his 20s, while working at the now-closed restaurant MK, he met Katrina Bravo, who had moved to Chicago from Miami in 2009 and was picking up small jobs whenever she could. “I got called in [to be a hostess] for a night and stayed for four years,” she says.

The couple got married in the summer of 2021 and opened Esmé READ ON

Gabriel García Márquez, Samuel Beckett, Louise Nevelson … an exhibition in Montreal showcases the photographer’s intimate portraits of aging, honing in on our universal mortality through wrinkles, follicles, and blemishes

By Tracy Doyle

A man who was older and in a position of power once said to me, “I feel sad for you. You’ve already been the most beautiful you will ever be, and now you have to spend the rest of your life watching your beauty fade.” I was just 30. I found a dermatologist, got Botox. “At your age,” this doctor told me, “it’s preventative.” The message was clear: Render your face immovable—lifeless!—and avert the crisis of aging. READ ON

The interior designer shares her go-to spots in the city she calls home

Before her decades-long tenure as a stylist and designer, Sibella Court spent her youth beachcombing the eastern Australian coast for shells, fostering what would become a lifelong love of collecting and curating.

She moved to New York in 1999, and for a decade worked as an interiors stylist for brands such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman. But she missed home. In 2008, Court returned to Sydney and founded Society Inc, a shop that she described as “part hardware store, part haberdashery and total make-believe.”

Three years ago, she closed the retail space to make way for Sibella READ ON

After documenting the Vietnam War and the Biafra conflict, the underbelly of London and the Beatles, the British artist Don McCullin turned to antiquity. His photographs of classical statues are now featured in a new exhibition in England

By Andrew Pulver

Don McCullin has lived several lives in the field of photography, many of them simultaneously. Born in 1935, he grew up in what he called “a constant roundabout of violence,” in the tough Finsbury Park area of London, leaving school (as many did) at 15. In the mid-1950s, McCullin did his national service in the Royal Air Force, where he eventually worked as a photographer’s assistant. He bought a Rolleicord camera and began focusing on what others, he later said, “cannot bear to see.” READ ON