PODCAST · arts
Verdurin
by Pierre d'Alancaisez
I interview authors of new books in art, critical theory, creative industry studies, and philosophy for the New Books Network.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a curator and critic. He investigates interdisciplinary knowledge exchange and the relationship between artists’ access to non-arts skills and the impacts of artistic practices. For a decade, Pierre was the director of Waterside Contemporary in London. He has also been a cultural strategist in higher education and the charity sector, a publisher, a scientist, and a financial services professional.
Episodes
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Progressive Agendas: Ben Cobley, Fraser Myers, Rupert Read
The idea of progress is one of the animating concepts of Western civilisation. It permeates our understanding of history and shapes the way we imagine the future. From Marxism and neoliberalism to today’s identity politics, progress offers a framework of knowledge and confidence: an assurance…
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Out of Print: Edmund King on the fantasy of reading's power
The anxieties around the decline of reading and literacy paradoxically give rise to outsized fantasies of the power of reading. As humanists feel increasingly under threat in the institutions, they attribute to reading (particularly the reading of fiction) miraculous and healing powers. In this,...
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Out Of Print: Nick Hostettler on the loss of value in the written word and beyond
Is the loss of value of literacy as symptomatic of a devaluing of human minds, experience, and relations. This devaluing is expressed in the dominant culture of technicist materialism. Does the devaluing of literacy coincide with a devaluing of human minds, experience, and relations, a devaluing...
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Out of Print: Kit Wilson on the tyranny of reading
What if the problem of literacy is not its decline, but rather our hyper-literate state? The written word has become a bulwark against experience, with the reading of social media posts or Substack essays is at best a distraction. In this, the third part of Out of Print, Kit Wilson explores the...
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Out of Print: Alison Brady on Vilém Flusser’s challenge to writing
Is writing under threat from AI? Is reading a lost art? Did the invention of writing itself irrevocably change human nature? And are we entirely proscribed by language? Concerns like these have a long history, and how we address them is not without consequences. Out of Print was held at…
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Out of Print: Daniel Hadas on Homer and the dawn of literacy
Is writing under threat from AI? Is reading a lost art? Did the invention of writing itself irrevocably change human nature? And are we entirely proscribed by language? Concerns like these have a long history, and how we address them is not without consequences. Out of Print was held at Verdurin…
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The Verdurin event podcast returns
Welcome back, it’s been a while since we posted anything in this channel. If you’re hearing this in September 2026, this is likely because you once listened to my book interviews. In 2024, I founded Verdurin in London. Verdurin is a cultural project, which offers everything you need to survive…
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Paranoia: Justin Smith-Ruiu
Questions like “What does this mean?” are central to our encounters with art. “How are these signs connected?” or “how do all symbols fit into an unstated scheme?” are the foundational concerns of aesthetics. Yet, when the same concerns crop up regularly in almost any other part of life, we give…
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Paranoia: Sam Jennings, A Long Thread
Questions like “What does this mean?” are central to our encounters with art. “How are these signs connected?” or “how do all symbols fit into an unstated scheme?” are the foundational concerns of aesthetics. Yet, when the same concerns crop up regularly in almost any other part of life, we give…
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Paranoia: Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, Reading Between the Lines
Questions like “What does this mean?” are central to our encounters with art. “How are these signs connected?” or “how do all symbols fit into an unstated scheme?” are the foundational concerns of aesthetics. Yet, when the same concerns crop up regularly in almost any other part of life, we give…
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Benjamin Studebaker: Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies
Liberal democracies don’t age gracefully. Established systems of governance like those of the UK and the US which once served as blueprints are today experiencing a profound crisis of legitimacy. In Britain, a landslide general election result was quickly followed by a catastrophic tumble in...
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Alfie Bown: Post-Comedy
Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge. Now, comedy is...
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Oliver Bennett: What We May Also Do
A recording of the "What We May Also Do" written by Oliver Bennett in response to Anna Sebastian's exhibition of the same title. Staged at Verdurin in July 2024. A woman approaches the gate of a walled city. Her admission depends on the depth of her moral liberation and embrace of boundless...
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Robert R. Janes: Museums and Societal Collapse
Who do you turn to at the brink of the apocalypse? What might help us to mitigate the financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural collapse for which we may be heading? Museums and Societal Collapse proposes an unlikely hero in this narrative. Robert Janes’ text explores the…
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Vid Simoniti: Artists Remake the World
Artists Remake the World puts forward an account of contemporary art’s political ambitions and potential. Surveying such innovations as evidence-driven art, socially engaged art, and ecological art, the book explores how artists have attempted to offer bold solutions to the world’s problems....
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Benjamin Studebaker: The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy
American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly subjecting Americans of nearly all income levels and backgrounds to enormous amounts of stress. The United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress, and politicians increasingly find that if they promise to...
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Adrian Rifkin: Future Imperfect
Then let the story really begin in 1968, though it has little to do with May. By chance it opens in January of that year, and it really concerns me rather than the world of political events, though these are always on my mind, as they were always on my mind. Future Imperfect, Adrian Rifkin’s…
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Samuel J. Redman: The Museum
On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames engulfed the museum’s castle. Rare objects and valuable paintings were destroyed. The flames at the Smithsonian were not the first—and...
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Sharon Hecker, Raffaele Bedarida: Curating Fascism
On the centenary of the fascist party's ascent to power in Italy, Curating Fascism examines the ways in which exhibitions organised after the fall of Mussolini's regime to the present day have shaped collective memory, historical narratives, and political discourse around the Italian ventennio.…
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Craig Leonard: Uncommon Sense
In Uncommon Sense, Craig Leonard argues for the contemporary relevance of the aesthetic theory of Herbert Marcuse, an original member of the Frankfurt School and icon of the New Left, while also acknowledging his philosophical limits. This account reinvigorates Marcuse for contemporary readers,...
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Rhea Myers: Proof of Work
NFT, BTC, DAO, ETH, WAGMI, HODL. It would have been hard to avoid these acronyms only a year ago. The hype around cryptocurrencies and blockchain art was almost as annoying as the glee with which crypto sceptics welcomed the sudden onset of the crypto winter. But for all the popularity of Bored...
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David Houston Jones: Visual Culture and the Forensic
Visual Culture and the Forensic bridges practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example, in performance and installation art, or photography. David Houston Jones speaks to Pierre...
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Toby Green, Thomas Fazi: The Covid Consensus
During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting that ‘the science’ was all politics and time reveals the horrific human and economic cost of…
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Leila Jancovich, David Stevenson: Failures in Cultural Participation
For the past two decades, the arts and cultural establishment in the UK has been trying to engage a broader set of audiences in their work. Countless initiatives to make the arts more accessible to the public and to make them more relevant have been advocated for in policy and funding…
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Kaelen Wilson-Goldie: Beautiful, Gruesome, and True
Art has a long history of engaging with conflict and violence. From the antiquities, through Goya, to Guernica, our museums are filled with depictions of battles, pogroms, uprisings, and their suppression. Not all of these stories are told from the perspective of the victors. Many contemporary...
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Aaron Moulton: The Influencing Machine
In the 1990s, a network of twenty Soros Centres for Contemporary Art sprung up across Eastern Europe: Almaty, Belgrade, Budapest, Kiev, Ljubljana, Prague, Riga, Sarajevo, Tallinn, Warsaw, and Zagreb among them. These centres, funded as their name suggests by Geroge Soros’ Open Society Foundation,...
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Geert Lovink: Sad by Design
Why is the internet making us so unhappy? Why is it in capital’s interests to cultivate populations that are depressed and desperate rather than driven by the same irrational exuberance that moves money? Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media...
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Peter Rehberg: Hipster Porn
It’s easy to forget that the cultural archetypes that pass for queerness today have historical roots. Some of these roots are mere years away from today’s reality but they are nonetheless distinct and come with their own artefacts and subcultures. Peter Rehberg’s book Hipster Porn looks at one…
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Gregory Sholette: The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art
Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own exploitation. They have also absorbed and…
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Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò: Against Decolonisation
Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonisation, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of...
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Nicholas Gamso: Art After Liberalism
Art after Liberalism is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be described as a crisis of liberalism. The apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making...
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Renzo Martens: Critique in Practice
In 2008, the artist Renzo Martens released his controversial film Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The film portrayed the artist as a colonial explorer travelling around the Congo’s plantations with the naiveté of the cartoon character Tintin. Martens…
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Karen Archey: After Institutions
Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded…
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Heide Hinrichs et al - shelf documents
How can a library change the world? How can an art library change the art school or the gallery? Or even an art practice? In shelf documents, artists, writers, curators, teachers, and librarians reflect on how they can use the beloved library as a source of inspiration or a field of action. In...
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Mattin: Social Dissonance
We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs: historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses. Under...
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Kuba Szreder: The ABC of the Projectariat
Labour has taken an about-turn. From Adam Smith’s proposal for specialisation which saw the factory line reorganised so that each worker needed to understand only a small aspect of the production process, many industries now rely on access to specialised skills and resources that are commanded...
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Joshua Citarella: Politigram & the Post-left
The internet’s potential to perform political miracles has been a source of both hope and disappointment for many grassroots movements. We remember that the Sanders campaign tried to master the meme to mobilise a young, eager audience. Equally, we ascribe Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 to...
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David Swift: The Identity Myth
In conversations about polarised political issues, phrases like ‘it’s not about race, it’s about class’ have become the perfect way to induce a stalemate. It seems as though the traditional, materialist critique of inequal ity has been supplanted by fast-evolving set of reflections of group...
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Mike Watson: The Memeing of Mark Fisher
Through his blog K-Punk, Mark Fisher become one of the cult figures of cultural theory after the economic crash of 2008. One of Fisher's insights, widely taken up by the online memesphere, was that capitalism breeds depression. Mike Watson picks up Fisher's prognosis when the locked-down pandemic...
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Georgina Adam, Nizan Shaked: The problem with museums
In the past few years, museums of contemporary art have come under a fair deal of scrutiny. Pressures from groups such as Decoloinise This Place or the oxycontin scandal have forced changes to the governance of some of the world’s best-known institutions. At the same time, the work of journalists...
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David Maroto: The Artist’s Novel
For better or worse, artists write. But why would a visual artist write a novel? How should such a novel be experienced? How does the artist’s novel compare or compete with literary fiction as we know it? David Maroto, the author of The Artist’s Novel considers the proliferation of artists…
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Abigail Susik: Surrealist Sabotage
According to the definition offered by Tate on the occasion of the exhibition Surrealism Without Borders, Surrealism “aims to revolutionise human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” Surrealism, therefore, produces…
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Julian Stallabrass: Killing for Show
Killing for Show Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and IraqJulian Stallabrass Published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2020 ISBN 9781538141809 In the autumn of 2014, the Royal Air Force released blurry video of a missile blowing up a pick-up truck that may have had a weapon attached to its...
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Keller Easterling: Medium Design
Medium Design Knowing How to Work on the WorldKeller Easterling Published by Verso, 2020 ISBN 9781788739320 How do we formulate alternative approaches to the world’s unresponsive or intractable dilemmas, from climate change, to inequality, to concentrations of authoritarian power? Keller…
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Nina Power: What Do Men Want?
What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its DiscontentsNina Power Published by Penguin/Allen Lane, 2022 ISBN 9780241356500 Something is definitely up with men. From millions online who engage with the manosphere to the #metoo backlash, from Men’s Rights activists and incels to spiralling suicide rates,...
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Grant Tavinor: The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality
The Aesthetics of Virtual RealityGrant Tavinor Published by Routledge, 2021 ISBN 9780367619251 When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of…
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Michael Newall: A Philosophy of the Art School
A Philosophy of the Art SchoolMichael Newall Published by Routledge, 2021 ISBN 9781032094342 If one were to devise a motto for the art school of today, the choice between ‘you too are an artist’ and ‘abandon all hope you who enter here’ would be difficult. Despite significant changes in…
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Anna Watkins Fisher: The Play in the System
The Play in the System The Art of Parasitical ResistanceAnna Watkins Fisher Published by Duke University Press, 2021 ISBN 9781478009702 What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce…
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Kim Charnley: Sociopolitical Aesthetics
Sociopolitical Aesthetics Art, Crisis and NeoliberalismKim Charnley Published by Bloomsbury, 2021 ISBN 9781350008748 Since the turn of the millennium, protests, meetings, schoolrooms, reading groups and many other social forms have been proposed as artworks or, more ambiguously, as interventions...
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Adam Lehrer: Communions
CommunionsAdam Lehrer Published by Hyperidean Press, 2021 ISBN 9781916376755 Artists from Kurt Cobain to Amy Winehouse command fascination not only for their work but also for their drug addictions and the manner of their death. Communions is an attempt to understand the role that opiates play in...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
I interview authors of new books in art, critical theory, creative industry studies, and philosophy for the New Books Network.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a curator and critic. He investigates interdisciplinary knowledge exchange and the relationship between artists’ access to non-arts skills and the impacts of artistic practices. For a decade, Pierre was the director of Waterside Contemporary in London. He has also been a cultural strategist in higher education and the charity sector, a publisher, a scientist, and a financial services professional.
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Pierre d'Alancaisez
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Verdurin currently has 55 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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I interview authors of new books in art, critical theory, creative industry studies, and philosophy for the New Books Network.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a curator and critic. He investigates interdisciplinary knowledge exchange and the relationship between artists’ access to non-arts skills and the...
How often does Verdurin release new episodes?
Verdurin has 55 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Verdurin is created and hosted by Pierre d'Alancaisez.
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