Design

Along with colleagues from Harvard Business School, Boston University and Hult Business School, the team looked at nine studies encompassing surveys and observations of patrons of the Metropolitan Opera, shoppers at Louis Vuitton in New York City, holidaymakers at wealthy playground Martha's Vineyard and other luxury consumers. … [Read more...] about People who love designer gear may suffering ‘imposter syndrome’ scientists believe

Tracy had issues with her vision as she was short-sighted but to avoid spending money on glasses which her children Millie, then five and Gabriel, then one, may break – she underwent laser eye surgery twice costing £5000. … [Read more...] about Single mum racks up £38k credit card bill with ‘mummy makeover’ including a designer vagina, 3 boob jobs and a butt lift

The young woman painted by Nicolaes Maes in the 1650s, resting her elbow on a cushion on a window ledge while she meditatively cradles her chin in her hand, looks like she is independently reaching the same conclusion as René Descartes just a few years earlier: “I think, therefore I am.” Maes’s masterpiece Girl at a Window shows her surrounded by solid things. A wooden window covering has been flung open to show its planks to us in perspective. Bright apricots bulge over decaying plaster and brick. And yet, as the girl contemplates the physical world, a black void opens behind her. It is the cavern of consciousness in which all she can be sure of is cogito ergo sum. … [Read more...] about Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the dark art of everyday intrigue

Rappolt said the list showed there were two different ways of looking at the contemporary art sector in 2013. One sees art as "an interchangeable exchangeable commodity", and one is about ideas and aesthetics. "As the art market and art scene generally has globalised, we are seeing a dominance of that sense of art as being something that is exchanged. What's happening with Qatar epitomises that. … [Read more...] about Qatar’s Sheikha Mayassa tops art power list

Kaplický was often called a visionary, a fluent draughtsman who dreamed up buildings inspired by spacecraft and aeroplanes, designs for a future that never arrived in the way he wanted, passionate and unworldly, his temperament and design approach allergic to getting things built. “He crossed the line,” Levete has said, “between reasonable and unreasonable on a daily basis.” He was one of several creative and charismatic individuals who have inspired her: the architects Richard Rogers and Will Alsop, for whom she worked; Zaha Hadid, a fellow student at the Architectural Association, an “incredible figure, always beautifully, beautifully dressed”, who became a friend; John Berger, whose Ways of Seeing she admired as a teenager. One of the reasons she enrolled at the AA, and became an architect, was that he was advertised as giving lectures there. He didn’t turn up. … [Read more...] about Architect Amanda Levete: ‘We have a responsibility to be radical and sensitive’