Anxiety, Baroque, Bubblicious, Chance, Discourse as event, Improvised, Ironic, Joyful, Neurotic, Perverse, Phenomenology, Playful, Repetition

Poe once wrote that all worldly things contain "the germ of their inevitable annihilation." Pretty cheerful stuff -- clearly this was a man obsessed with ruin and with death. His characters typically suffer from various forms of mental and physical deterioration; their minds seem to have a predilecti

Anxiety, Dark, Death, Gothic fiction, Grotesque, Intense, Lyrical, Sublime, Symbolist poetry, Violent

Faced with an unforgiving lump of marble, the 80-year-old Michelangelo sent more splinters soaring (and at three times the speed) than three robust stone cutters could produce. Mad with loneliness (his lover, Vittoria Colonna, closest friend, Luigi del Riccio, and lifetime servant, Urbino, were all d

Anxiety, Dramatic, Ecstatic, Intense, Renaissance art, Tragic, Visceral

In one image, a drunken, disheveled man dips a jug into a bucket of home-brewed beer that sits next to his chair in a squalid living room. In another -- a close-up -- a woman eats a slice of pizza. She's obese, covered in tattoos, and wearing a weird assortment of shabby clothes; the pizza oozes from

Anxiety, Dark, Dystopic, Gritty, In-your-face, Young british artists