We are blitzed by media and entertainment from so many sources and angles that being truly wowed seems like a quaint idea, maybe nearly impossible. But a bit over a century ag...

American artist Jeff Koons has exhibited giant, shiny, stainless-steel balloon dogs, a 40-foot-tall puppy made of flowering plants and self-portraits of himself in X-rated pos...

Most smartphone owners have felt it — GPS Shame. It strikes when you fire up an app to locate a building 200 feet away. How did anyone get anywhere before Google Maps? “Ti...

To the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians, the Persians were the neighbors from hell. There was an exception: Cyrus the Great, who launched the Persian Empire by conquering Baby...

Christina Cauterucci and Debra Greenspan have got some nerve. The artists spent a month, off and on, persuading strangers on the street to reveal the search histories on their...

“My husband asked, ‘How is this even a portrait?’ ” says Dorothy Moss, a curator at the National Portrait Gallery, as we sit and watch “Buffalo Milk Yogurt,” a s...

Any art exhibition that features a faux stick of butter is clearly unconcerned with the grand and exalted. Sculptor Robert Gober’s particular butter stick — “Untitled (2...

When the EPA was established in 1970 to address rising concerns about pollution, it ushered in the modern American environmental movement. The agency also committed itself to ...

The Phillips Collection calls the show “Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet.” An alternate title might be “Faces in the Crowd.” Few of the intricat...

Artists Mary Coble and Blithe Riley’s most recent work, the 23-minute video “Watermarks,” brought them to the middle of a partially frozen sea. “In the beginning we wo...

A musky odor wafts from a former utility closet on the Phillips Collection’s third floor. The culprit: about 660 pounds of beeswax, coating the walls of German artist Wolfga...

It wasn’t exactly difficult to shake the foundations of the Victorian art world. Using a particularly bright blue might get you branded a revolutionary. British painters Joh...

Barry Clifford is just like Indiana Jones. Only he wears a baseball cap with “Whydah Dive Ops” on it. And doesn’t carry a whip. And he scuba dives. Clifford is the under...

Birds with human qualities are often Disney characters. The Freer’s “Edo Aviary” — scrolls and other avian paraphernalia from Japan’s Edo era (1615 to 1868) — prov...

Tom Mirenda is passionate about orchids. In addition to managing the plants as the Smithsonian Gardens’ orchid specialist, Mirenda keeps a personal collection of 1,000 orchi...