What’s next for the White House?

Plus: Have we reached peak Bloomsbury? ͏‌

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The end of the East Wing marks the end of old certainties, writes Will Wiles

What really shocks is the brazen nature of the demolition, rather than anything special about what was demolished. No permission was sought; indeed, few seem to have been aware that it was even possible. The symbolism was on-the-nose. The experience of the Trump presidencies, both within the United States and outside it, has been the dissolution of various comfortable assumptions about American power. Those certainties have been eroding for some time, but here they have their visible emblem. The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St Louis in 1972 did not mark the beginning of the end of modernist architecture in the United States, but rather the point at which a hidden process, the ebbing of confidence, became spectacular. It was an image to put on the covers of all the books, a visual metaphor. And so it is with the East Wing.

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Lucy Davies on the real housewives of 'Golden Age' Amsterdam

'At Home in the 17th Century' rigorously embraces as many 'things' as masterpieces. Yes there are handsome tapestries, carved wood cabinets and priceless dolls' houses, but they jostle for space with cracked cooking pots, lice combs and memorieboeken – notebooks in which women recorded the things they purchased, housekeeping tips and favourite recipes. Even the contents of a cesspit.

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Valeria Costa-Kostritsky on what the Louvre heist says about France

Since the French president dissolved the National Assembly in June last year, three governments have collapsed and the current one has just narrowly won a vote of no-confidence. Despite calls for his resignation, Macron is still clinging to power and to symbols of power such as the Louvre, which he chose as the backdrop for his victory speech eight years ago. Hours after the theft the president tweeted: 'The theft committed at the Louvre is an attack on a heritage that we cherish because it is our History.' Macron promised that the jewels would be found and the culprits brought to justice.

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Helen Stoilas visits Princeton University's brand-new art museum

The desire to attract a dual audience was the reason to keep the site where it is, within a 10-minute walk of every undergraduate residence hall and close to the town's main thoroughfare on Nassau Street, according to James Steward, director of the museum since 2009. 'Symbolically, it's both incredibly important and rare that a university like Princeton, when it came time to make a better art museum building, would make the decision to do it right in the middle of the campus, a stone's throw from the historic centre, because the more commonplace decision would be to find some unbuilt edge location,' he says. 'Students would not, in fact, be able to stop in, in the two minutes they have between their residences and the dining hall.'

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Susan Moore takes her time exploring the Icelandic art scene

Timescales where change in the natural world is imperceptible to the human eye are explored in 'Sediment and Signal' at the Nordic House. Ragna Róbertsdóttir works with elemental materials. Mindscape, 'slow clocks' where sea salt or black lava salt is mixed with water and left to crystallize, eerily evoke both the smallness of the rockpool and the vastness of the cosmos. Rhoda Ting and Mikkel Bojesen are also interested in the meeting of art and science, growing and studying living organisms such as the fungi installed here in Rhizome and interpreting the millennia-old sediment drilled four kilometres under the ocean floor in Deep Time. 'We are interested in what continues to evolve, survive and adapt, and what we can learn from them,' Bojesen says.

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In the current issue…

Matthew Sperling has had enough of Bloomsburymania

Of course, it doesn't matter whether Bloomsbury Group were snobs or casual racists or whether they treated their servants poorly. They've all been dead for decades, and making art and literature has nothing to do with being a morally admirable person. The more important questions are: first, did the self-confessed snobbism, the insularity, the attitude towards the poor, set a limit upon the artistic achievements of Bloomsbury? And second, what are the consequences today of giving such a central position to work that is bound up in so many ways with generational wealth and deference to the tastes and tacit assumptions of the upper-middle classes?

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What’s next for the White House?

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