It is easy to minimize the importance of symbols in culture. Art tends to focus on existential symbolism, leap-frogging over the ways in which we interpret symbols constantly, in the form of letters, ...

Art theorist, intellectual historian, and cultural scientist Aby M. Warburg mused: Was bedeutet es, sich im raum zu orientieren?, a physical and spiritual mouthful which roughly translates as, “What ...

In Seattle artist Catherine Eaton Skinner’s landscapes, sometimes the bindu makes all the difference. A bindu is the dot, not always red, seen in Hindu art and sometimes on people’s foreheads. It is, ...