Human genius can be observed in many of its works. Nowhere is it more detectable than in the arts: music, literature, and the visual arts. As a species, seen from above, we are all fairly clever. But some are—or were—truly exceptional. What did they require to rise above the rest? What made them singular, beyond the reasoning most of us share?

I have not the faintest idea why The Times, in its February 16 edition, informs us—by a delay so un-British—that Damien Hirst’s Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain has been installed in the Camellia House at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Not only that work: The Watchtower, by Auke de Vries, and Muamba Posy, by Vanessa da Silva, both outdoors in the Country Park.

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, part of University College London (UCL), houses one of the most important collections of Egyptian artefacts in the world. It preserves more than 80,000 objects recovered from excavations conducted between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among them are hundreds of shabti, small funerary figures that formed part of the ritual equipment of tombs in ancient Egypt...

Anyone who approaches Pedro Abascal’s photography and speaks with the author about the spontaneous nature of his scenes cannot help but think: he’s taking me for a fool. So accustomed have we become to an art of effects—an art frequently structured around spectacle, one that opportunistically deploys “the technological” to shield the fragility of its premises—that it feels like a deception when he claims he neither goes out hunting for images nor resorts to manipulation of any kind to produce photographs of such suggestive force...

The aesthetic and existential possibilities that Pedro Guevara opens through his practices summon us to sustain an attentive gaze toward how we perceive the world in relation to our authentic growth and existential harmony, bearing in mind that his artistic doing never detaches itself from lived practice when establishing its discourse...

The Pattern & Decoration (P&D) movement, once dismissed for its embrace of "decorative" arts, is now celebrated for challenging traditional art hierarchies. Explore its legacy and modern-day echoes in Cincinnati, where creative hubs like the Freeport Row Art Alley are contributing to a thriving art scene, with a mural by Esteban Leyva at Liberty and Elm streets.

For a very long time, the overhandled story of Numantia has occupied a central place in the repertoire of national political rhetoric. It is cited in such a reduced, schematic way that it borders on the grotesque. The citadel stood on a hill slightly over one kilometer above sea level. At its foot lies today the village of Garray, barely sixty meters lower—modern, pragmatic.

In Sapiens (From Animals into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind), the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari advances a disturbing yet lucid idea about the function of empires in history: imperial systems are neither pure evil nor pure progress. They conquer, repress, dominate, and exploit—but they also weave global networks: routes, rules, currencies, lingua francas, infrastructure, commercial circuits, the circulation of technologies and ideas, culture, art, and knowledge.

Forty years ago, the American photographer Nan Goldin published what is now widely regarded as one of the most influential photobooks in contemporary art. That is the view of Jacqui Palumbo—journalist, editor, and producer specializing in art and culture—who covered this event for CNN. Titled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the book documents Goldin’s life in New York City’s East Village throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with forays into Chicago, London, and Mexico City.