Arts and Culture – Pod Academy

Cautiously, museums across the world are opening their doors. But there's one place where, even during the pandemic, you always get to be up close - the virtual museum. In the digital environment, the museum can take on a new role, less a place of authority, more an agora of ideas. But we have to think outside the box to solve curatorial issues in the digital space.  Zara Karschay takes us on a tour...... . To see each and every brushstroke. To handle priceless objects. A place where figures in famous works of art turn to look back at you. A place where you can stay as long as you like in front of the Mona Lisa. Virtual collections aren't new. But for much of last year, our only option to see museum was online. And 2020 had many more cultural institutions racing to develop their virtual collections and tours. As we enter the promised ‘new normal’, or perhaps even a ‘virtual-first’ era, where we might come to see a collection and objects online before going in person, we wonder, what can virtual collections give us that physical collections cannot? How can we turn the novelty of technology into something more meaningful, something that introduces us to new stories that helps us change our minds? Or maybe, that even changes the perspective the museum has of itself?   ME: We are definitely rethinking how we're using digital in our collection.   ZK: This is Maria Economou, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Glasgow.   ME: The digital is not just the technology that underpins it, but also affects the way the museum is seen. It affects its identity, the way we see ourselves. I think the first few years of digital heritage and digital activity, the digital, unfortunately, was the strong partner, and the cultural heritage was the weakest relative. It's improved a lot, but you see even today that sometimes the whistles and bells and the graphics the tech was really the main driving engine rather than, “Who are we doing this for?” “Who are the users?” “What do these collections require?” and being focused more that way.   ZK: In the digital environment, the museum can take on a new role, less as a place of authority and more, an agora of ideas, which also reforms the way that visitors see their role in the museum.   ME:  To think of themselves not just as end-users and consumers and producers of this material, but to put themselves in the position of being critically engaged with this. How do we make sense of personal memories? What do we feel are common memories to be shared? What gives us and helps us define ourselves? It's a shift in your position, in your role, and much more active one.   ZK: In 2018 Professor Economou produced the Digital Heritage Strategy for the university's museum, the Hunterian. One of its themes was to find ways to engage a broader public by building and sharing knowledge. From the digital agora to the ancient Roman marketplace, the Hunterian can tell stories about associated but disparate collections, well beyond the walls of the museum.   ME: The actual act and art of storytelling has been taking place for so long. And all good cultural institutions are doing some form of storytelling. Even if it's just by putting objects together, even the juxtaposition and placement in space is telling a story and a narrative. We have, for example, in the Hunterian an important part of the Antonine world collections, which is from Roman Scotland. So, one of the parts of the Roman Empire’s most northern frontier, then it goes all over Europe, and then the rest goes south to Africa. So, it's a great big scheme for UNESCO to connect all the sites that relates to the frontiers of the Roman Empire. We were looking at how digital storytelling can support emotional engagement with our collections. So, even for people who actually don't really care that much about Roman Scotland, or history or some of those objects,

Hello, this is Pod Academy.  Of late, there has been much talk of sexism, in particular sexual harassment, behind the scenes in the film industry.  But what about the films themselves?  Pod Academy’s Tatiana Prorokova took a look at the hit movie Beauty and the Beast.  One of the highest grossing films this year, it has taken over $1bn worldwide. The recent adaptation of the famous Disney cartoon – Beauty and the Beast – is the film that through a children's story raises the profound questions of female oppression and sexism that have existed in our society for centuries. The story focuses on the girl Belle (played by Emma Watson) who lives with her father in a small village in France. Belle is considered weird by most of the villagers and the reason for that is her love for books. The girl is frequently portrayed with a book in her hands; such an image, however, provokes rather negative responses from the people around her primarily because they believe that education, which, in this context, is access to books that Belle has, is not for women. The scene that illustrates this idea even more vividly takes place later in the film when Belle is teaching a small girl how to read. The crowd largely disapproves of that. Sexism thus manifests itself not only through the reactions to the girl who likes reading but also, and perhaps even more crucially, through the idea that men and women have different privileges. This foregrounds gender inequality and reminds the audience about the perverse norms that were generated and sustained by patriarchy. Belle later finds herself in the castle, where she came to save her father (played by Kevin Kline). She chooses to stay there instead of him, sacrificing herself for the well-being of her parent. Her stay in the castle supports the ideas of sexism and female inequality in multiple ways. First and foremost, being the Beast’s (played by Dan Stevens) prisoner, she is literally locked in the castle. Yet one can interpret this imprisonment from a different angle and argue that it figuratively embodies the existing gender inequality. The visibly subordinate relationship between Belle and the Beast metaphorically visualizes patriarchy in the family life or perhaps even stands for family tyranny. In this respect, the image of the Beast only intensifies the power and cruelty of the oppressor. The castle becomes Belle’s cage where she is both literally and symbolically locked. The girl can only wait for someone from the outside to come and save her. That savior, as the audience can easily guess, could be Gaston (played by Luke Evans) – the former soldier who wants to marry Belle. Belle is thus portrayed as a fragile girl who is oppressed by a male and who can be ultimately saved only by another male. In the castle, the enchanted servants forcefully redress Belle so that she can look like a real lady – again, the image that is constructed by patriarchy as the only right one and imposed on women. Belle is portrayed in a pompous dress, she is wearing a wig, and her face is richly covered with vulgar makeup. The girl ultimately rejects these clothes, preferring to stay in her old ones. While the castle symbolizes Belle’s cage, it is pivotal that this is the only place where she is not laughed at for her love for books. The Beast shows her his large library and Belle’s heart seems to melt, for she now has something that she wanted to have so much – access to education. Nevertheless, Belle remains a prisoner; thus while she gets something what she likes, she is still under full control of the Beast. Apart from Belle, there is another important female character in the film that is introduced to support the issue of sexism provoked by patriarchy. This is Agathe (played by Hattie Morahan). Agathe is first introduced to the audience as a beggar who saves the life of Belle’s father but later turns out to be the enchantress. There are several scenes in the film with Agathe and Gaston that ...

A radical vision for arts policy should be at the heart of any progressive government argue Professor Rod Stoneman and Adam Stoneman. Note: This is not a transcript of the podcast interview with Rod and Adam, but rather the text of a paper by them on arts policy. Restoring financial support for the arts would hardly amount to a radical transformative vision for the arts.  The major proposals in a recent document from the Labour party, for example, were entirely defensive: ‘reinstate arts funding’, ‘safeguard our galleries and museums’, ‘protect the BBC’. It does not have to be like this; in 1965, Government Minister Jennie Lee published Britain’s first cultural white paper, ‘A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps’, in which she addressed uneven regional distribution and unequal access to the arts and committed state support for infrastructure. The paper led to the creation of countless museums, galleries and concert halls across the country and completely transformed Britain’s cultural landscape. Rather than attempting to merely return to this post-war model of funding however, we should apply its principles to the challenges of the present. Access and involvement. Research shows that well-educated middle-class professionals are most likely to be drawn to the areas of the cultural sector that are dependent on public funding such as opera and theatre, with those on less well-educated unskilled and semi-skilled workers tending to be more involved in the commercial culture industry. Instead of restoring a subsidy model that entrenches this division, we should seize the opportunity to change the funding system in a way that broadens and deepens the audiences that engage with publicly funded arts. The prevalence of unpaid internships and unpaid labour in the arts presents a major financial barrier to access for those who do not come from privileged backgrounds. Discussion of a ‘real living wage’ to protect arts workers is a good start but there should be a root and branch approach to tackling the lack of diversity in arts organisations, from the shop floor to upper management – of the directors of our ten most popular museums, all are white and only one is a woman. Renewed and dynamic versions of culture need to be brought out of the institutions into the widest public sphere; for large sections of the population there are invisible barriers to entering galleries, arts centres and concert halls – we can unconsciously assume “those places are not for me”. We should be looking to bring art activities beyond existent facilities to intervene directly in public spaces and within communities. Theatre groups working on civic initiatives, artists’ placements, musical ensembles from housing estates, filmmakers in workplaces and writers conducting workshops in local libraries enable myriad forms of individual and group self-activation. A focus should be placed on facilitating and empowering marginalised communities to speak without constant mediation; this would include the funding of workshops, training and skills-based initiatives, enabling communities to shape discourse about themselves from the very beginning. Importantly this should not be sidelined into ‘community art’ as once-off, philanthropic gestures but should be a guiding principle of national arts policy. Public art can renew the sense that urban space belongs to all of us. The success of the Fourth plinth project in Trafalgar square, or the use of billboards to display modern painting in Tehran demonstrates this well. Too much of our visual environment is dominated by commercial marketing; companies operating billboards on public land could be required to periodically devote space to classical or contemporary art. Regional access should be inclusive, localised and democratic; London, and to a lesser extent, the other select urban centres benefit disproportionately from arts funding. Publicly funded theatre, dance,

Why and how should we interpret visual art? With a vast historical sweep - from early medieval art on the walls inside the Basilica of San Vitale to Banksy's 2015 stencils of shipwrecked refugees on walls in Calais,  by way of Caravaggio, Nevelson and Rothko - author, artist and film maker  Gillian McIver looks at various theories of art criticism and helps us understand how to approach visual art. This lecture was part of series on Thinking put on by the IF Project, the free university in London.  IF is an innovative project offering free humanities courses to young people who have been priced out of today's higher education market.[We have another podcast from the IF lecture series, looking at the relevance of studying history: here.] Gillian McIver starts from the premise that "The most important mechanism  for interpreting visual art is your own eyes and your ability to really see and to really look.....Go, stand in front of the work of art, literally, physically,  look at it. Walk around it, look at its texture, look at its colour..." She goes on to explore how different approaches in art criticism can inform what and how we look.  She considers traditional ways of looking at art (eg the historical approach, looking at historical periods)  looking at influences and techniques, artistic movements, looking at the artist, and looking at the times in which the artist lived, the cultural and social environment in which the artwork operates. Artworks considered are: Basilica of San Vitale    Medieval Hans Memling:  Virgin with the child and angel  (National Gallery, London)  Late Middle Ages Titian:  Bacchus and Ariadne  (National Gallery, London)   Renaissance Claude:  A Seaport  (National Gallery, London)   Baroque period. David:  Oath of the Horatii (Louvre, Paris) John Singleton Copley  The Death of Major Pierson 6 January 1781  (Tate Britain, London)  History Painting Also mentioned Henry Osawa Tanner - first major black artist in European tradition Caravaggio: The Supper at Emmaus  (National gallery London) Caravaggio Supper at Emmaus (Milan) Mark Rothko:  Black on Maroon (Tate Modern, London) Louise Nevelson: Black Wall (Tate Modern, London) Also mentioned Robert Rauschenberg (forthcoming Tate Modern exhibition December 2016 - April 2017) Nazeer Tambouli - site specific art on housing estate Banksy: We're not all in the same boat. Calais. Ericault: Raft of the Medusa (Louvre)

This podcast is the second in our series on new concert music.   New music can be unfamiliar and challenging - this series, written and presented by composer Arthur Keegan-Bole, is designed to present new music in a non-scary way or at least to explain that composers are making logical music - not trying to make weird, 'difficult' music to confound the listener. The sublime music in this podcast, I will Pour Out My Spirit, ‘Effundum Spiritum Meum’, is a newly composed piece by Benedict Todd relating to the lost sounds of a ninth century Iberian liturgy.  It was composed as part of Bristol University's exciting Old Hispanic Office project. Now over to Arthur to introduce this podcast....... Arthur Keegan-Bole:  Hello, you’re listening to I will Pour Out My Spirit, ‘Effundum Spritum Meum’, a podcast about how a newly composed piece of music relates to the lost sounds of a unique liturgy called the Old Hispanic Office which was first sung on the Iberian Peninsula before the 9th Century. Hold on, stay there, stay with me. It’s not as niche-an-episode as you might think. No working knowledge of early medieval Spanish church-going is necessary… I promise. My name is Arthur Keegan-Bole and I’m a composer the purpose of these podcasts is to explain ways that new music relates to music of the past. In this episode we are going way back to music first written down in the Tenth Century and how musicological research into this repertoire has directly inspired the piece of music you’re hearing. The piece was written in 2015 by Benedict Todd (hello Benedict!). You’ll hear much more from him as we discuss then interaction of music and text and how the medieval notation greatly influenced his piece of music. We’ll also hear from Dr Emma Hornby who leads the cross-disciplinary research team investigating the Old Hispanic Office and whose project spawned the call for new works. All this to come, but for now lets just enjoy this really good bit… Before getting onto the new stuff, lets explore what the Old Hispanic Office actually is by first hearing what it is not. It’s not the familiar sound of Gregorian chant which forms the Roman Catholic liturgy and which could be said is the genesis of the entire Western tradition. Emma Hornby:  The old hispanic office is what was sung across most of Iberia until about the year 1080 when there was a big suppression of it by the pope. [AKB] This is Dr Emma Hornby, an early music specialist and reader in music at the University of Bristol. She heads up the Old Hispanic Office project. [EH] It’s a Western, Latin, Christian church but it’s not the Roman liturgy - that’s the Gregorian chant. [AKB] Okay, so brass tacks - ‘liturgy’ we’re talking about how the church goes about structuring services through the day [EH] Exactly so, yes. So the Office is the way that monks and clerics go around and around singing the Psalms, singing chants, readings, prayers and the shape of how they do that in medieval Iberia was unique, different from anywhere else in western Europe. It’s not just that the melodies are different and that the texts are different, it’s that the whole shape of the liturgy is different, so you get through the day in different ways and it’s almost entirely un-studied. [AKB] Interesting stuff to an early musicologist or historian maybe but what has this got to do with composers? That stems from Emma’s novel response to a problem with the sources for this music - the notation does not give enough information for the sound to be fully recreated. We can’t know what it sounded like. [EH] As I was planning this research I kept coming against the sticking point that I want to share my research with the widest possible audience and that’s not just… I mean, there aren’t many other scholars interested in Old Hispanic chant before you start. There aren’t even that many scholars interested in Gregorian chant, it’s a niche interest.

This is a podcast about music.  A podcast about Nocturne.  A podcast of a Nocturne inspired by the BBC's nightly Shipping Forecast.  Produced and presented by composer, Arthur Keegan-Bole A K-B:  Oh dear, I crashed the pips. In the world of radio, crashing the pips - that is, talking over the six sine tone beeps that mark the hour on BBC radio - is a serious faux pas. So, please, let me start again. Hello you are listening to Nocturne, a podcast about music, its relationship with the night. My name is Arthur Keegan-Bole and I’m a composer. The music you’re hearing is a piece I finished at the start of this year. It is called Nocturne and Nocturne is what this podcast is about. In it you will hear about the music’s materials and meaning, especially the role of radio extracts in the sound-world of the music which includes the BBC pips and, everyone’s favourite sedative, the Shipping Forecast. The piece was written and premiered in America so we will also discover how a non-U.K. audience without knowledge of these niche British sounds might understand this music. Let’s start by thinking about what a nocturne is. This is musicologist David Fay… David Fay:  As you can probably tell from the words relationship with the English adjective ‘nocturnal’ a nocturne is a piece of music suggestive of the night. Although the Italian form of the word ‘notturno’ had been used frequently in the 18th Century as a name for pieces that were designed to be performed at night, it was Irishman John Field who first coined the French word ‘nocturne’ to describe a particular musical genre in a set of piano pieces published in 1815. Thereafter the Nocturne became a popular genre of composition for romantic pianist-composers most famously Frederick Chopin whose twenty-one Nocturnes remain the pinnacle of the genre. Field’s Nocturnes and many of those composed by others subsequently are lyrical in nature, with the pianist’s right hand playing a graceful, singing melody over broken chords in the left. The relationship with the night in these piano Nocturnes is usually in their evocation of a tranquil atmosphere which can be associated with the nocturnal ambience of a calm, still night… presumably in the countryside. However, despite the quietly lyrical, pianistic connotations of the word ‘Nocturne’ it has been used as a title for pieces written for other instruments and ensembles particularly from the Twentieth Century onwards. Some of these explore other aspects of the nocturnal environment - whether the natural sounds we hear at night or the world of dreams, or, perhaps, nightmares to which we succumb nightly. A K-B  I hope my piece simply has the sound of a nocturne - unspecifically yet unequivocally conjuring night-time. However, we all like a story to guide us, and a narrative of some kind helps the composing process a great deal. So, let me ask you… have you ever fallen asleep to the sound of the Shipping Forecast? Between 12:40 and 1:00am a magical series of sounds are broadcast on BBC Radio 4. This is Closedown. A tune called Sailing By kicks it off, this is what is known in the trade as an ‘identifier’ so those trying to tune in can easily find the station, it is also a ‘buffer’ filling time so that the Shipping Forecast (which follows) starts exactly the scheduled time. I’ve always wondered why they use Ronald Binge’s light orchestral tune. Would it not be clearer to continually repeat the name of the station? Perhaps, but that is certainly not good radio. So, to an extent at least it’s an aesthetic choice. For a long time I struggled to sleep, from time-to-time I still do but I can always count on this bit of radio to help me drift. It is about drifting between one state and another all sorts of strange, ‘in-between’ landscapes and seascapes. This is the narrative behind the first half of this music. It is a strange lullaby, drifting between the real and the unconscious, lingering in a penumbral state.

“Originality doesn't mean creation from nothingness.....it can also mean reusing something in a very creative and innovative way... if we took the standards of how people create that are implicit in a lot of copyright law cases, that basically say 'you can't copy', most of what we consider to be great classical works couldn't have been created...” In this episode, Adriene Lilly talks to Olufunmilayo Arewa, Professor of Law at University of California Urwin about her work on musical borrowing and copyright law in the United States. Olufunmilayo, who goes by Funmi, is a law professor at University of California Irvine. Her work on music and law includes: From J.C. Bach to Hip Hop: Musical Borrowing and Cultural Context about the diverse range of borrowing and inspiration in music across history and genre; Copyright on Catfish Row: Musical Borrowing, Porgy & Bess and Unfair Use  focusing on the influences on George Gershwin's work, and his estate's tight hold on it's copyright. She is currently writing a book about the influences of African American music and the business and legal implications of it's global reach. You can find links to some of her other work, and a little more information here. What does it mean for something to be creative? Original? How much transformation must occur before we allow an artists to claim ownership of an idea? Appropriation, inspiration and creative borrowing is common across disciplines and traditions. Existing in everything from science to painting, from cooking to film. Today, we're focusing on appropriation in music. “...There is a conception that some types of music are more original than others, and we often make those determinations in a very de-contextualized way. Originality doesn't mean creation from nothingness, it could mean that (not often the case in music), but it can also mean reusing something in a very creative and innovative way. So I think, originality should not be the opposite of copying. Originality might involve copying and it might not, that depends on genre, composer, [...etc]” (from the podcast) We talk about the history of the idea of originality and creativity in music; The evolution of music copyright; The differences between music and literature; The many meanings of 'musical borrowing'; The role of estates in copyright enforcement; And some of the current trends in copyright cases brought against musicians. We briefly discuss the recent Blurred Lines case (information about the case here, and music here), and the work of George Gershwin (Porgy and Bess, Summertimeand the spiritual Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child). Funmi's work considers the historic and conceptual issues that we find embedded in various rulings regarding musical borrowing. In 'From J.C. Back to Hip Hop' she tackles the actual creative practices of classical composers versus the myth of how we often believe they composed. “... if we took the standards of how people create that are implicit in a lot of copyright law cases, that basically say 'you can't copy', most of what we consider to be great classical works couldn't have been created...” (from the podcast) Her works highlights the huge variety of creative practices that exist, and have existed, throughout music history. Beethoven, for example, was known to be a skilled improvisational player and Debussey a commentator on Wagner. Yet, today we see many of these musicians as artists who crafted work in isolation, as if unaffected by their own social context and histories. Her work makes the argument that by recognizing some of these similarities between actual classical practice and contemporary practice, we can begin to embrace the multiple ways that creativity can occur. “...hip hop artists are not the first artists to encounter this reaction to what some might perceive as too much borrowing...” (from the podcast) In Copyright on Catfish Row she discusses the work of George Gershwin and through this exampl...

'A spindly shit coppice, with ghosts of plastic bags rustling in its branches.' This week's podcast, by artist Robin Bale, is an evocation of a windswept rubbish dump under the M11 motorway.  It starts with the sounds of moving through undergrowth, traffic in the background. A twig snaps. Abstract and slow percussion fades in....... A burnt boot…crushed cans…ashes…binbag, spilling its guts…burnt plastic…soles detached…from shoes…ashes…roof tiles…single rubber glove…over the mounded and overgrown rubble…sparks of new, blue off-licence bags leap out against the leaves…the green and the brown…and the traffic on the road beyond flickers between the trees. [sound of traffic and birdsong fades. Percussion continues then fades] I wish to talk about spaces. It could be that as soon as the first building was built and the city was founded, that there came into being a margin or corner - the angle of two walls, the space just down there, just past where the bins are. Only existing in relation to that building, only coming into existence with it, this site was where things were left, forgotten, hidden; with the understanding that they were left or forgotten there and should be left alone, although not far away. Almost in plain sight. Children, strangers and fugitives would go there and it would nearly be in sight and earshot of that first structure; just outside the window, just against the wall. [percussion returns quietly] I wish to tell you about such a place, that I have named the Bike Cemetery. The Bike Cemetery is a mere crumb of land, a piece of what I suppose could be called urban waste ground, an increasingly rare commodity in the city now, especially one less than a mile from the site of the 2012 Olympics - that place of victorious national becoming. [sound of traffic fades in] It is demarcated - you might say cut adrift - by a busy main road and a slip road and overpass for the M11. A spindly shit coppice, with ghosts of plastic bags rustling in its branches. The sort of place you might find yourself first light on a Monday morning, in the piss-thin drizzle, wondering how you got there and knowing that you were meant to be somewhere else and thinking "not again". As far as I know it lacks a name, so I have called it the Bike Cemetery. When I first came across it early this century it was full of the stripped carcasses of bicycles that I assume were nicked somewhere nearby and cannibalised on the site. [traffic and percussion, with bird song field recording from site] I have called it an entrance to the underworld, at other times, the unacknowledged centre of the city or the centre of the state. The Bike Cemetery also attracted a writer and bricoleur. The wall of the overpass was liberally graffitied. The texts, constructed from single words or short phrases, heavy on repetition and play, were not the usual -  not political slogans, football chants, sexual slander or biblical quotations. [percussion fades leaving field recording, traffic and bird song] There were portmanteau words, a stuttering repetition of syllables, an obsessive chant running through its centre: Wolf Vanish. This was interspersed with collaged printed matter, predominantly magazine images of animals, fashion photographs from the late 1980s,  Monopoly money and food packaging; some porn, though not nearly as much as might be expected.  Judging from the dates on the magazine pages the work was done sometime around 1991. [percussion returns] Due to the handwriting of the graffiti and the thematic consistency of the whole thing, and that the same paint was used to write and stick the images to the wall, I'd say that the entire wall was the work of one person. It has remained there for almost a quarter of a century, under different governments, different weathers. [percussion and traffic] After having been a fairly regular visitor to the site I have not returned there for around two years until yesterday,

The late Stuart Hall said cultural studies, within a Marxist tradition,  enables us "to understand culture - cultural discourse - the place and relationship of the ideological." In this podcast, which is part of our Marxism in the 21st Century series, Steve Edwards, Professor of History of Art at the Open University talks to Kieron Yates about Marxism and Culture.  They explore how Marxism can be seen as a profoundly aesthetic philosophy, with many of its central categories coming from thinking about art and aesthetics, the organisation of sensibility......   VOICE: STUART HALL:  It's not that Marxism is not around but that the kind of conversation which Cultural Studies conducted with …   against some aspects of … around the questions… expanding a Marxist tradition of critical thinking... that is absent and that is a real weakness. I think important gains were made which enable us to understand culture... cultural discourse… the place and relationship of the ideological. So I think a lot of ground was covered... kind of  conceptual ground was covered which could go to enrich the position provided the basic conversation is re-engaged but if it's not re-engaged then that interim period... you know ... Cultural Studies lost its way and will find it again.   Kieron Yates: Hello and welcome to Pod Academy. You just heard the late Stuart Hall with an assessment of the status of Marxism in Cultural Studies he gave to the academic Sut Jhally in 2012. In this edition of Pod Academy I speak to Steve Edwards - Professor of History of Art at the Open University - about the development of culture studies in Britain out of particular Marxist traditions and ask if more recently Marxism has been able to reassert the relevance. I began by asking what Marx and Engels themselves had to say about cultural phenomena. Steve Edwards: Its  patchy to start with.  I think there are two things to say about that…   they were very educated men of there time, with very extensive literary tastes in the  high culture of particularly Europe… very well read. I don't think that there is any point where they... there is no extensive development in the ideas of Marx and Engels. Marx did originally plan to write an aesthetic he never did so ... he wrote poetry as a young man... Engels wrote some kind of ... there are occasional pieces... largely on literature but I think beyond that what's important about what they did is to recognise that in some senses Marxism is a profoundly aesthetic philosophy... that so many of its central categories come from thinking about art and aesthetics… the organisation of sensibility.  So the whole debate for instance on alienation on the alienation of labour ... the debate about fetishism...the whole sense about a kind of future society which will overcome the divisions between mental and manual ... that will heal the rifts of class; these are fundamentally aesthetic categories. So I think, more than just thinking about what they explicitly wrote about art or literature, what's important is to think about how the discussions and thinking, particularly in German idealist philosophy, about art entered fundamentally into shaping their view of the world.   KY: Marx and Engels can be seen as part of a tradition of social criticism that was taking place in the Nineteeth century that encompassed thinkers and writers on aestheticism such as Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold and Dickens. At times intensely conservative, romantic in sensibility and anti-modern, this aesthetic critique of capitalism also found a more progressive voice in William Morris.   SE:   There's a separate trajectory there,  which is  there's a kind of tradition of British social criticism that's very centred on art in the 19th century. One might think about Ruskin, about Carlyle, about Dickens and Arnold. These are figures that fundamentally reject capitalism... they reject the new kind of modernity.

Podcast produced and presented by Lily Ames This podcast is part of our Feast for the Senses strand and is the first of a mini series on the study of Sound by Lily Ames. Mike Wyeld: It’s a new world, it’s like the sound is in the air as everybody jokes about at the moment and it really is, we have that ability now to have people who are dedicated to thinking about how we hear and what kind of rich culture is that.   Lily Ames:  Mike Wyeld has many roles a the Royal College of Art, including instructing in both the animation and sound departments. For the last few years he has run the Sound Lab at RCA. In this programme we will hear from Mike and a few of his students about how they’re breaking new sound in the academic world.   MW: So I suppose in sound at the Royal College of Art we treat it in a couple of ways. First of all as a post production technique for filmmaking, so for animation we have quite a well respected animation department, the tracks are entirely crafted here so the students learn how to create their own foley, their own sound effects, atmospheres, that kind of thing and learn how to record it themselves. They also move on, we mix it professionally, we have full 5.1. pro tools based sound mixing facility and we also have a large sound recording area so large live room and we have everything from bands to orchestras to individual musicians to foley sessions - you name it, we do it. So that’s the more conventional part of it. In an academic sense we also think of sound in a fine art context. A few years ago, here in the UK an artist by the name of Susan Philipsz won what is generally considered one of Britain’s most biggest art prizes - the Turner Prize. It was for a work rendered entirely in sound and since then we’ve kind of seen an explosion in people wanting to work in sound for its own sake - so sound for galleries, sound for installation. And really, the way to think of it is to think of the ear temporarily displacing the eye as the seat of thinking.   I suppose in the last five or six years we’ve seen an explosion in people working in sound in a number of different ways. We’ve also seen the explosion of people being able to work with sound because of its democratization. Pro tools, the grandaddy of software for example, now works on a laptop and now avid, the company that owns it have announced there will be a 16 track version of it for free for everyone to use on earth. So, people are able to now manipulate sound, design sound and think about sound in new ways without a great deal of knowledge or expertise. They can now just get going with it. So we’ve seen that happen and we’ve also seen people become interested in some of the myths of sound, so there’s a lot of sound in terms of what it can do to the body and how it can affect you physically and we know that it does have physical effects. So we’re seeing a lot of new technology and everyday people starting to grapple with that, including artists.   LA: As sound technology becomes more accessible, students have started to show interest in the field.   MW: I’ve noticed people being able to think and speak more intelligently about sound, because there’s a lot more thinking out there about sound, so that’s the first thing. The other thing is I’ve noticed people starting to want to engage in sound, it used to be the case that you would go into a gallery and if there was a moving image work it would often be silent and I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think people are more brave about accompanying their image with sound they’ve deliberately chosen as opposed to sound that is naturally upon the chosen image. So people have intentionally brought sound to their moving image work. I’ve also noticed people realizing the emotional power that sound has. In terms of enrollment, RCA has seen an increased enrollment over the last five or six years, and studying fine art despite the increased expense is more popular than e...

This podcast about urban smellscapes was produced by Jo Barratt and first aired on Life in Scents.  It is part of our 'Feast for the Senses' series. Have you ever stepped off a plane and been aware of a different smell in the air - the smell of a country, a city, a terrain? This podcast is a fascinating exploration of our urban smellscapes.  We are all familiar with landscapes - 'smellscapes' are the smell equivalent. It is drawn from a lecture by Victoria Henshaw lecturer in Urban Design and Planning at University of Sheffield, whose specialism is smell.   The lecture took place after one of Victoria's 'Smell Walks', organised by Scratch and Sniff events and explores how we live and navigate using our noses, how cities can be mapped by aroma, and how architects and planners might use a consideration of this in their work. It starts by looking at how we adapt to different smells.  Usually we are smelling so many different things but we don't process them all consciously as it would be overwhelming to do so. Some smells are cultural, some smells we are more tolerant of at certain types of day(such as beer at night), some smells we experience differently depending on our genes (eg Androstenonethe the hormone in body odour - sometimes called the caveman odoour - which 60% of us can smell, but 40% cannot smell.  Of those who can smell it,  90% smell body odour, but 10% smell flowers!)  Have we 'sterilised' our environment, rid it of the smells? Victoria finishes with a bit of futurology, and she tells us to expect smells for our mobile phones - which will give us different smells for different callers! If you are interested in further exploration in the world of smell, the absolute go-to podcast platform is Life in Scents, which has lots of podcasts of interviews with people looking at their lives through smell.  Also take a look at Victoria Henshaw's great blog, Smells and the City, and Odette Toilette's olefactory adventure events. Photo, Amsterdam: Fons Heijnsbroek And find our podcast on Anosmia here.

To begin at the beginning: It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. [Under Milk Wood] 2014 is the centenary of the birth of the poet Dylan Thomas. Scarlett MccGwire went to talk to Dr. Leo Mellor who writes and teaches about 20th century literature, particularly Anglo Welsh Literature and modernism, at Murray Edwards college Cambridge, where he is the Roma Gill Fellow in English. She started by asking him what’s so special about Dylan Thomas that the centenary of his birth is being celebrated around the world? Leo Mellor Dr.Leo Mellor: I think it is to do with the way he brings a particular intensity to language. To the way he writes poems, that force or push language into moments of unexpected power and beauty and strangeness. He makes us see everyday things as strange again and he helps us see a beauty in things one would not normally consider beautiful.     Scarlett MccGwire: Like? LM: I suppose you could think of his most famous radio play ‘Under Milk Wood’ and how he takes the average life of people in a little town there. Petty jealousy, their loves, their desires, and transforms them into something that is funny, beautiful and terribly moving -  it’s just one night, in one little bible-black town. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now. SM: Do you think he captures Wales? LM: He captures a certain part of Wales but he also turns Wales into a place that is shaped by Dylan Thomas’s way of looking, thinking and feeling about things. This is not reportage, this is not the lives of people as lived in the 1930’s and 40’s in his formulation of 'South Wets Wales' and Swansea. He takes things from an area and he transforms them. SM: Under Milk Wood is celebrated around the English-speaking world, so it’s much bigger than Wales isn’t it? LM: Yes, because it’s a way of using radio, using a medium, where you don’t get to see anything. You get to see, in your mind’s eye, the characters who are constructed through how they speak and how they describe other people, and sound effects. So, it’s a play that is apparently about a small seaside town in west Wales, but uses a medium to do something quite incredible. SM: He is most famous for Under Milk Wood, but also there are poems. LM: It is important for us to remember how long his career was. He died age 39, but he was writing poems as a teenager, and these are not adolescent works, these are published in the Volume 18 Poems and they are amazingly good. I will read the first stanza of the first poem from the 18 poems I see the boys of summer I see the boys of summer in their ruin Lay the gold tithings barren, Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; There in their heat the winter floods Of frozen loves they fetch their girls, And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.   These boys of light are curdlers in their folly, Sour the boiling honey; The jacks of frost they finger in the hives; There in the sun the frigid threads Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves; the signal moon is zero in their voids.   I see the summer children in their mothers Split up the brawned womb’s weathers, Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs; There in the deep with quartered shades Of sun and moon they paint their dams As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.   I see that from these boys shall men of nothing Stature by seedy shifting, Or lame the air with leaping from its heats; There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse

This podcast is presented and produced by Kieron Yates. Although he’s one of France’s most widely read and popular authors of the twentieth century, Boris Vian has never won the international recognition gained by friends and contemporaries such as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Kieron Yates talks to Alistair Rolls, Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia about the life and work of Boris Vian Even within France, apart from a few doctoral studies, Vian’s work has remained outside the consideration of academia and to some degree is still frowned upon by scholars. The closest most English speaking audiences will have come to Vian’s work is probably Michel Gondry’s 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which drew inspiration from two of Vian’s novels. More recently Gondry has directed a film of Vian’s most famous book, L’Ecume des Jours. Titled Mood Indigo for English speaking audiences, the film stars Audrey Tautou and gets its US and UK cinema release this summer. A recent translation of Vian’s poems and short stories – If I say If- published by the University of Adelaide Press, and co-edited by Alistair Rolls means that for the first time all of Vian’s short stories are available in English. Born in 1920 at Ville D’Avray, a bourgeois town on the western edge of Paris, Boris Vian was raised in a world of imagination fuelled by literature and society games. His parents were well-off and his early life was carefree and comfortable. But, in 1929 the stock-market crash ended the Vian fortune. The Vian’s were forced to move into the caretaker’s cottage of the family home so they could rent out the main house. At the age of twelve Vian was diagnosed with a heart condition that consigned him to his bedroom and to the care of his mother. Boris’s health improved in his teenage years and he went on to become a brilliant scholar who, reputedly, had read everything. Alistair Rolls: He was clearly very talented from an early age. One of his next door neighbours as a child was Yehudi Menuhin and Menuhin and he used to play chess together. He was very sharp. He was very mathematically alert… very musically alert early on and he was brought up in a very culturally alert environment so he was exposed early on to opera and all kinds of classical music. I kept on coming across the expression, “Il a tout lu”…he’s read everything. No one’s read everything. Then the people in the Boris Vian Foundation in Paris took me aside and said , “You have to understand that you know that we publish more now than we used to publish.” So back in the 1920′s it was not possible to read everything but you could give it a damn good shot. So he had this ongoing heart condition which he had from early on. I think it wasn’t just the heart condition that stifled Vian. It was then people’s reaction to the heart condition notably his mother. So he was certainly over mothered when he was young and I think he rebelled against that. And then you have this overwhelming thesis which is such that Vian killed himself by living. He lived too hard and brought about his own death. KY:  Boris’s obsession with literature and language led to him cultivating a passion for punning and wordplay. He also began to learn English in his spare time. Music also played a major role in Boris’s teenage life. At the age of 16 he developed a passion for jazz and went on to become not only a competent trumpeter and band leader but a highly regarded critic and editor for jazz magazines. In the immediate post-war years Vian could be found in the trendy hotspots of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, rubbing shoulders and exchanging ideas with other luminaries of the area or simply playing his trumpet in the lively clubs. MUSIC:  Basin Street Blues – Boris Vian with Radiodifussion France introduction: It was around this time that Vian’s first literary works began to be published.

“Biography is actually a quest for lives that speak to us” said biographer Hermione Lee. So what is the role of the biopic in contemporary film culture? What is it that we are looking for in the increasingly popular 'biopic' genre - films like Selma, Diana, Saving Mr Banks, 12 Years a Slave or The Wolf of Wall Street that claim to be based on real life events and aim to depict episodes in the lives of their protagonists? Pod Academy's film specialist, Esther Gaytan Fuertes, went to talk to Tom Brown and Belen Vidal, two lecturers in Film Studies at King’s College London, about their recent book, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, to find out more about this genre. Esther started by asking them if they felt the biopic was a neglected area in Film Studies.  Belen Vidal: Well, yes and no – it’s been studied but yes, perhaps it hasn’t been studied enough. The thing is that the biopic as a genre has always been there, I mean, it goes back to the beginning of film history. 1915 Birth of a Nation about Abraham Lincoln But the biopic has also cropped up as part of other genres and that’s the way it’s been looked at mainly by scholars -  as biopics that were part of the musical genre, or gangster films or Westerns... All those genres would have biographical elements or would occasionally do stories that are based on real characters, or real lives or people that existed. So, in a way, there’s been forming an idea of the biopic throughout film history as part of the popular genres, but the truth is that when Tom and I came into this project we also did it because we were interested that, in all this time, basically what we have is only two books, which are two excellent starting points to study the biopic, but it seemed very little considering the popularity of the genre. It’s worth mentioning that the first book that took the genre seriously or did a kind of serious comprehensive approach was George Custen’s book called Bio/pics: How Hollywood constructed public history – this was a book on the classical biopic, mostly films made in the 30s and 40s, and it focused on Hollywood. After that, recently we’ve had a book coming out by Dennis Bingham [Whose Lives are they Anyway?] about the biopic in contemporary film culture. And again this is a book that tackles the modern biopic - the biopic since the post war period and up to the contemporary moment. But, again, it’s very heavily leaned towards the English language. So we thought, why not doing a kind of more reviewing of the biopic in the last twenty years especially and how also the genre has spread, has become more visible internationally? Because what Tom and I were struck by was the huge number of films coming from very different national cinemas all marketing themselves as biographical films and many of them very often being immensely popular. If we think about La Môme (that was called La Vie en Rose) here, a French film about a French singer, Edith Piaf, making it all the way to the Oscars, all the way up to kind of the big time in Hollywood and it’s distributed all over the world. What were the conditions that were creating this appetite for biographical narratives and how these films are now becoming much more visible not only from Hollywood but from all over the world? So we wanted to study this phenomenon and say something about the biopic in contemporary film culture and that’s what the book is about. What approach do you adopt in your book to study the biopic? Belen Vidal: What we are really interested also is in the narrative structures, in the tropes that recur time and again. Is there such a thing as the poetics of the contemporary biopic? Is there such a thing as a kind of certain structures that are being used and reused time and again, new genres forming...? That’s what we were interested in when we were looking at the different chapters and bringing the work together and trying to find the different points in common between chapters that ve...

Pod Academy's Daniel Marc Janes speaks to playwright and academic Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway and one of Britain’s leading theatrical commentators. Daniel Marc Janes: I’m in the Calder Theatre Bookshop in London. It couldn’t be better located to evoke Britain’s theatrical heritage, situated as it is on The Cut alongside the Old Vic and the Young Vic. Looking at the bookshop’s selection, I can see plays from some of the most distinguished British playwrights of recent years. Here’s David Greig... Sarah Kane... Dennis Kelly... Mark Ravenhill. What all these writers have in common is that they all studied drama at the university level. But drama at the university is a recent innovation. Many of Britain’s most brilliant playwrights have been autodidacts: Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare. So why study drama? I’m in the downstairs rehearsal space of the Calder Theatre Bookshop. This is a place where writers and performers go to make plays come alive. But how far can the inscrutable, mysterious act of playwriting be taught in an academic environment? What is the role of drama in the university? To talk about these topics, I’m joined by Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, author of numerous stage and radio plays and of several books, most notably 1956 And All That: The Making of Modern British Theatre. Professor Rebellato, thank you for joining us. Dan Rebellato: Thanks very much. DMJ: So before we start to unpack the broader questions, I’m wondering whether you could outline for us a kind of potted history of drama as an academic discipline in the British university. DR: There are lots of examples, of course, of theatre being made in universities and that goes back centuries, but drama as an academic discipline really starts in the late 1940s at the University of Bristol. Oxford University, during the war, set up a commission to see if drama was a suitable subject for the universities and it was a very ramshackle affair. They booked the wrong flights and they lost their luggage and they ended up with half the amount of time they were supposed to have. And they recommended that you shouldn’t do drama at the university. But the University of Bristol decided that it was a good subject and that was the first degree – I think that started in about 1947, 1948, something like that – and the big waves of expansion followed from there. Manchester, Hull was quite early, but the 1970s had a lot of expansion and the 1990s saw another big wave of expansion as well. DMJ: But what’s interesting is that drama, as an academic course outside of English, took some time to be accepted. Even at Bristol it took them 21 years for drama to be a full honours degree. You mentioned the committee at Oxford; Oxford and Cambridge stopped short of having full honours drama courses. Where do you think that this lack of acceptance comes from? DR: A lot of things that I think are interesting about the theatre are the reasons why it can sometimes be a difficult subject in the academy. Because it’s neither purely literary, nor is it purely a live experience. It’s a kind of mixture of the two. I think that in academic terms – of course there are certain kinds of theatre that are, in a sense, purely live and also purely literary – but also I think there’s a sense in which theatre is clearly a collection of different crafts and skills, because you have scenic designers and you have actors and you have directors and you have writers and composers and so on and so on. That maps on in the academy into the fact that it’s a very interdisciplinary subject. So in order to fully – if you could ever fully understand theatre – you’d have to be a bit of a linguist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a psychologist, a bit of an archaeologist and so on and so on and so on. And the question is left: if you took those things away,

Year-in, year-out the circus comes to town. But in 2013 circuses are in trouble. Seen by many as entertainment from a bygone age and facing Government action to ban circuses with wild animals, what is it that keeps circuses on the road? Why do they carry on going? In this podcast, Lee Millam talks to Professor Ron Beadle, Director of Research Ethics at Northumbria University, who has published the first major study of the motivations of circus-owner directors in the UK and Ireland. His research, published in The Journal of Business Ethics, examines the factors that drive circus managers to continue in the industry despite such intense opposition and obstacles. “The people who run Britain’s circuses do it for love, not for money…Their business is vulnerable to the weather, to animal rights protestors, hostile local authorities and increasing fuel costs. Yet they continue because of an emotional bond with their art form and the people who perform it. The circus is a unique form of entertainment. Unlike the theatre, the artists create their own performance and on every circus you can find people from across the world living and working together in a single travelling community. Like many modern organisations, circuses are both global and local and have been like that for a very long time.” The modern circus began in Britain in the 1760s before being exported to the rest of the world. They became enormously popular in the 19th Century and the first half of the twentieth century but the last few decades have seen a marked decline. Professor Beadle’s research, entitled Managerial work in a practice-embodying institution: The role of calling, the virtue of constancy, is published in The Journal of Business Ethics.

Audio-visual art is familiar, but the audio-olfactory is surprising. Oswaldo Maciá explains why he uses sound and smell to construct knowledge in his exhibition The Library of Cynicism at CHELSEA space until July 20th.

Can art produce a space where people can create change, make change or at the very least be heard?

If you find Shakespeare's language difficult, help is at hand.

UK composer Graham Fitkin's pieces responding to the Iraq War and Guantanamo, Chain of Command and No Doubt, bring together words and music in uncompromising ways.

A musical journey from Bach to Dappy, looking at pitch, auditory illusions, 'perfect pitch', musical synysthesia and why cash machines use the tritone!

In this 4th Huston lecture, British film theorist Laura Mulvey analyses the relationship between stillness and the moving image in cinema, drawing on Rossellini's Journey to Italy.

Musician, DJ and radio producer, Chris Berrow, discusses live music and what the word "live" actually means.

Shakespeare in the Arab world, from a production off the coast of Yemen within Shakespeare's lifetime to an early Egyptian Hamlet that is a musical with a happy ending.

Think tourism is just for out-of-towners? Think again. Alex Bingham takes a stroll and encounters some of London’s walking guides. She finds out about University of Westminster's guiding course and a lot more about London.

Hollywood screenwriter, Howard A Rodman, talks about how to write a compelling film scene, and says that a formulaic approach to screenwriting has lead to movies that are all the same.

The remarkable life of A.L Lloyd: folk collector, writer, activist, broadcaster and an influential figure in the British folk revival

Irish feminist filmmaker Pat Murphy talks about the people, ideas, events and contexts that have influenced her work, including Brecht, the Troubles and the long shadow of James Joyce.

Charles Dickens was a francophile who had a little known passion for the French language, life and culture. A Tale of Two Cities, set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, is only part of the story. Much of his journalism was also about France.