Once the haunt of the avant-garde, installation art has matured into a 21st-century mass-culture phenomenon. There is no better evidence of this evolution than the immense popularity of Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored “infinity rooms.” READ ON

When Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and an occasional pianist, proposed teaming up for Franz Schubert’s 70-minute Winterreise (Winter Journey), the mezzo-soprano superstar Joyce DiDonato had her doubts. Each of the cycle’s 24 songs is in its own way a station on a jilted lover’s descent into alienation. Again and again, he finds his state of mind reflected in images of wintry desolation: a weathervane whipped around in the wind, one last leaf trembling on a branch, a crow winging overhead. Not once does the poet Wilhelm Müller—a minor romantic who but for Schubert would be forgotten—abandon the wayfarer’s point of view. But what went wrong with his love affair? READ ON