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A mini-lesson based on an amNY article, reporting on a new immersive exhibition in New York that recreates the 7 October 2023 attack on the Israeli music festival.

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TRAUMA VIA ART | ACT mini-lessons (Middle)

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A mini-lesson based on a Tech Republic article, highlighting the practical, artistic, legal and moral questions that have accompanied the rise of AI-generated art.

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A UNIQUELY HUMAN ACTIVITY? | ACT mini-lessons (middle)

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2024/5 A CNN article, looking at how an award-winning Japanese novelist has just spoken about using ChatGPT to write portions of her recent book, Tokyo Sympathy Tower.

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2024/5 A CNN article, looking at how an award-winning Japanese novelist has just spoken about using ChatGPT to write portions of her recent book, Tokyo Sympathy Tower.

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The winner of a prestigious Japanese literary award has confirmed AI helped write her book | CNN

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After author Rie Kudan won one of the country's most prestigious literary awards, she admitted she had help from an unusual source.

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A Guardian article, looking at how cutting edge AI is being used to identify fake paintings, supposedly created by artists such as Monet and Renoir. 

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A Guardian article, looking at how cutting edge AI is being used to identify fake paintings, supposedly created by artists such as Monet and Renoir. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Does technology support or undermine the integrity of art?

KEY TERMS Not authentic, Counterfeit, Fully guarantee, Contested

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A "Monet" and a "Renoir" are among up to 40 fake paintings that are being offered for sale on eBay, according to research by a leading expert.

Dr Carina Popovici, a specialist in authenticating artwork, said she applied cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technology to pictures advertised on the online platform and was shocked to discover that many had a "high probability" of being "not authentic".

She has so far found up to 40 counterfeit paintings, and said there were a lot more.

"The algorithm identified all of them as fakes," she said.

"We looked today and we downloaded some images, and there were fakes all over the place. Everything that we have analysed turns out to be not real art, a negative probability with 95% or so. I'm sure that this is just the tip of the iceberg."

Pictures that have been identified as fakes by the AI tests include one advertised as a Monet, titled Forest With a Stream and priced at $599,000 (£477,000), andone listed as a Renoir, described as a study of Claude Renoir, costing $165,000.

On its website, eBay states: "We don't allow counterfeit items or unauthorised copies to be listed."

The listing for the Renoir was removed after the Guardian contacted the seller - who is based in Florida with the eBay username metasis. In a message to the Guardian they said they did not sell false art.

The 'Renoir' listed for sale on eBay was removed after the seller was contacted by the Guardian. Photograph: eBay

The seller for the Monet, has the eBay user antiquepage and is based in Millersburg, Ohio. They have not responded to the Guardian.

A description for the listing states: "I fully guarantee that the painting is an original 1867 oil on canvas signed and dated by Claude Monet. The painting is not in perfect condition and I do not have any provenance beyond me having it for over 20 years."

Popovici has written repeatedly to the platform since December 2023 to convey her concerns. She reached out to its offices in the UK, Germany and the US.

In her emails, she said it needed to address the problem "with the seriousness it deserves".

She is still waiting for a response. She said: "I tried so hard to talk to them. I'm extremely frustrated that they don't answer. I'm really very disturbed about this. They have a responsibility. They can't just pretend that they don't see what is happening, because there is so much of this. There are clear indications that there is a major problem there."

Ebay told the Guardian: "The sale of counterfeit items is strictly prohibited on eBay, and we are committed to ensuring that goods sold on our platform are authentic.

"We do this by using multiple layers of AI technology, professionally trained eBay investigators and buyer protection programs. EBay proactively blocked 88m suspected counterfeits from being published in 2022, while removing 1.3m items from the platform following a review by an eBay investigator.

"In this case, we had already removed one of the items flagged to us."

Popovici is the head of Art Recognition, a Swiss company that collaborates on research with Liverpool University and Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Its technology uses two types of artificial neural network in analysing artists' works in intricate detail, from brushstroke patterns to colour palettes. Art Recognition has applied it to more than 500 works in various collections. It gave a painting by Rubens in the National Gallery - A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning - a probability of 98.76% in favour of the artist. But it also challenged the attribution to the Flemish master of Samson and Delilah, supporting long-held doubts by some critics that it is only a copy. The technology has also supported the identification of contested works, such as an 1889 self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh at the National Museum in Oslo.

Popovici said the technology had transformed the ability to identify fakes online: "In the past, it was really difficult to spot these things, because you can't take samples from an image on the internet. But, with the new technology, it's easy. You can just download an image and then in 10 minutes, you will know. I think that people should be warned."

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Fake Monet and Renoir on eBay among 40 counterfeits identified using AI

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Paintings identified as fake using cutting-edge technology are 'tip of the iceberg' specialist Dr Carina Popovici says

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2024/5 An AP article, reporting on the story of Ace-Liam Ankrah, A Ghanaian toddler who has just been awarded a Guinness world record for being the youngest ever male artist.

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2024/5 An AP article, reporting on the story of Ace-Liam Ankrah, A Ghanaian toddler who has just been awarded a Guinness world record for being the youngest ever male artist.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What makes a person an ‘artist’?

KEY TERMS Artist, Encourage and inspire, Painting and growing and playing

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ACCRA, Ghana (AP) - Meet Ace-Liam Ankrah, a Ghana toddler who has set the record as the world's youngest male artist.

His mother, Chantelle Kukua Eghan, says it all started by accident when her son, who at the time was 6 months old, discovered her acrylic paints.

Eghan, an artist and founder of Arts and Cocktails Studio, a bar that that offers painting lessons in Ghana's capital, Accra, said she was looking for a way to keep her boy busy while working on her own paintings.

"I spread out a canvas on the floor and added paint to it, and then in the process of crawling he ended up spreading all the colors on the canvas," she said.

And that's how his first artwork, "The Crawl," was born, Eghan, 25, told The Associated Press.

After that and with his mother's prodding, Ace-Liam kept on painting.

Eghan decided to apply for the record last June. In November, Guinness World Records told her that to break a previous record, her son needed to exhibit and sell paintings.

She arranged for Ace-Liam's first exhibition at the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra in January, where nine out of 10 of his pieces listed were sold. She declined to say for how much the paintings sold.

They were on their way.

Then, Guinness World Records confirmed the record in a statement and last week declared that "at the age of 1 year 152 days, little Ace-Liam Nana Sam Ankrah from Ghana is the world's youngest male artist."

Guinness World Records did not immediately respond to an Associated Press query about the previous youngest male artist record holder.

AP correspondent Ed Donahue reports on a very young artist.

The overall record for the world's youngest artist is currently held by India's Arushi Bhatnagar. She had her first exhibition at the age of 11 months and sold her first painting for 5,000 Rupees ($60) in 2003.

These days, Ace-Liam, who will be 2 years old in July, still loves painting and eagerly accompanies his mom to her studio, where a corner has been set off just for him. He sometimes paints in just five-minute sessions, returning to the same canvas over days of weeks, Eghan says.

On a recent day, he ran excitedly around the studio, with bursts of energy typical for boys his age. But he was also very focused and concentrated for almost an hour while painting - choosing green, yellow and blue for his latest work-in-progress and rubbing the paint colors into the canvas with his tiny fingers.

Eghan says becoming a world record holder has not changed their lives. She won't sell "The Crawl" but plans on keeping it in the family.

She added that she hopes the media attention around her boy could encourage and inspire other parents to discover and nurture their children's talents.

"He is painting and growing and playing in the whole process," she says.

___

AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

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A Ghana toddler sets a world record as the youngest male artist. His mom says he just loves colors

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A toddler in the West African country of Ghana has set the record as the world's youngest male artist. Meet Ace-Liam Ankrah, who will be 2 years old in July.

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An ARTnews article, looking at the forthcoming sale of Wu-Tang Clan’s album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, of which only one CD exists.

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An ARTnews article, looking at the forthcoming sale of Wu-Tang Clan’s album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, of which only one CD exists.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What gives art its value?

KEY TERMS Revolutionary, Cheapened the value, Unique property, Mystical properties

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Wu-Tang Clan's single copy album "Once Upon A Time in Shaolin," 2014. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

An album secretly recorded by the hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan is slated to be part of an exhibition at Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). The most expensive record ever sold was designed to be a work of fine art.

Titled Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, it was recorded in Staten Island, New York, and produced in Marrakech between 2006 and 2013. It includes the nine surviving members of the group, and features Cher and Game of Thrones actress Carice van Houten. There is only one CD in existence.

The revolutionary hip-hop band, formed in Staten Island in the early 1990s, is known for their violent and sexually explicit lyrics conveying the trauma of African American experience with levity. Believing that online streaming and piracy has cheapened the value of music, Wu-Tang Clan decided to create an album as a unique commodity.

Once Upon a Time in Shaolin includes an ornate hand-carved nickel box and a leather-bound manuscript, complete with lyrics and a certificate of authenticity. The piece comes with the legal condition that the 31 included tracks cannot be released by the owner for 88 years.

As part of Mona's "Namedropping" exhibition, small listening parties will be able to listen to a 30-minute curated sample of the album.

"Every once in a while, an object on this planet possesses mystical properties that transcend its material circumstances," Mona's director of curatorial affairs Jarrod Rawlins told the . "'Once Upon a Time in Shaolin' is more than just an album, so... I knew I had to get it into this exhibition."

Until now, only a handful of people had heard some of the songs on the album, including a group of potential buyers and media when the album was up for sale in 2015.

Disgraced drug firm executive Martin Shkreli bought the album for $2 million and streamed snippets on YouTube to celebrate the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016. In 2018 the album was handed over to US prosecutors after Shkreli was convicted for defrauding investors. Digital art collective Pleasr purchased and still owns the album.

Mona has produced a number of provocative exhibitions, including its "Ladies Lounge," which has since become the subject of an antidiscrimination case.

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Extremely Rare Wu-Tang Clan Album to Be Played at Australian Exhibition

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The most expensive record ever sold, Wu-Tang Clan's Once Upon A Time in Shaolin, was designed to be a work of fine art.

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A Guardian article, exploring why a Scottish artist has received hundreds of copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the post from people all over the world. 

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A Guardian article, exploring why a Scottish artist has received hundreds of copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the post from people all over the world. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Hans K Clausen refers to his installation as being “a monument to the defiance of the printed word”. What does he mean, and to what extent is great art and literature about ‘defiance’?

KEY TERMS Interactive, Neutral artist, Defiance, Materiality, Modern resonance, prescient

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Copies of George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four have been arriving at an artist's studio in Edinburgh for months. Every shape and size, posted from Ukraine, Hong Kong, Peru, Germany, Cape Cod and Sarajevo.

Some are in mint condition, others are dog-eared, tea-stained, heavily annotated or turned into graffitied art works. One is a water-stained first edition; one is a secret love letter from a married woman to her first love; another, a graphic novel version, came from Orwell's son Richard Blair.

Each has been donated to a unique installation in the community hall of Jura, the Hebridean island where Orwell, in dire poverty and desperately ill, wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four during the late 1940s, to mark its publication 75 years ago.

Hans K Clausen, a sculptor based in Edinburgh, is collecting 1,984 copies of the book to exhibit on Jura for three days in early June. It will be an interactive, "living" sculpture where visitors are invited to open and read every volume.

Many have arrived, often with overseas postmarks and customs stamps, addressed to "Winston Smith, care of Hans K Clausen".

"I don't see my art project as political," Clausen said. "It has politics woven through it, but it also has a love story woven through it, so I'm interested in Nineteen Eighty-Four the novel; I'm interested in all the layers," he said.

"Often people overlook the romance and the love, and this man trying to find his own humanity. It gets lost in the Big Brother-ness of it all. So in some ways, I'm trying to be the impartial, neutral artist inviting people to take from it what they will."

One correspondent, a married woman who called herself Julia, after the hero Winston's lover, sent in her personal copy as a memorial to her first love, a man also married to someone else, her Winston.

Clausen said his installation, the Winston Smith Library of Victory and Truth, is designed to be "a monument [to] the defiance of the printed word". He is still taking donations and is about 100 volumes short of the target. In return each donor receives an enamelled pin-badge as a gesture of thanks.

Clausen wants visitors to appreciate the materiality of each volume: the Russian copy printed on coarse paper; the impeccably printed Japanese edition; the hand-cut Canadian volume on thick paper; the musty odour and yellowing edges of the oldest copies; the intense annotations and highlighting in others, and the inexpert repairs with sticky tape to the ones with battered spines.

In his small studio at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, a volume from Ukraine sits alongside another from Russia; one in Arabic leans on another in Hebrew; there are Chinese editions in Cantonese and Mandarin. Another came in from the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, which bore the brunt of Serbia's ethno-nationalist war 30 years ago.

Audiobooks will be broadcast over two wide-mouthed loudspeakers, reminiscent of the speakers that indoctrinated the citizens of Airstrip One. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Clausen has worked with secondary school pupils in Edinburgh, London and on Jura itself, with pupils who live there but go to school on neighbouring Islay, who have customised copies using paint, scalpels and pens. A teacher and sculptor at Cape Cod community school in Massachusetts cut an intricate Big Brother artwork into his.

The installation includes audiobooks on cassette and films on DVD. The audiobooks will be broadcast over two wide-mouthed loudspeakers reminiscent of the omnipresent speakers that indoctrinated the citizens of Airstrip One.

Visitors to Jura will find a desk with a 1940s typewriter and a paperweight, in reference to the object Winston bought in the antique shop above which he and Julia conducted their illicit affair. The shop itself was a front for the thought police.

Clausen, who is self-financing the project after being turned down for funding, hopes the sculpture will tour. The Orwell Foundation, set-up to promote courageous writing and based at University College London, has expressed interest.

"When I get home from Jura, that's my credit card maxed out," he said. "It does have to be seen. I feel like it's a commitment, that this needs to go somewhere."

The project has the blessing of the Orwell Society, a group set up under Richard Blair's patronage in 2011 to promote his work. Quentin Kopp, the society's chairman, whose father, George, was Orwell's commander in the Spanish civil war, said they spent time talking to Clausen.

"We satisfied ourselves this was a very genuine initiative," Kopp said. Kopp is among the donors, giving Clausen an early copy of Penguin's paperback editions from the 1960s.

"This book has a clear modern resonance with many things that are going on. It's staggering how prescient Orwell was."

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Scottish artist receives hundreds of copies of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in the post

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People around the world have sent the book, with their personal stories, to Edinburgh for an installation to mark its publication 75 years ago

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A Conversation article, looking at the ‘genius’ of Beyonce’s new album, Cowboy Carter, which he says is based on the way it defies and challenges our perception of musical  genres.

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A Conversation article, looking at the ‘genius’ of Beyonce’s new album, Cowboy Carter, which he says is based on the way it defies and challenges our perception of musical  genres.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is a characteristic of great art that it challenges the genre that we attempt to place it in? Do genres help us, or hinder us, from understanding art?

KEY TERMS Construction of genres, Opaque, Scrutiny, Social context, Meaning, Interpretation, Essential, Subvert

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Cowboy Carter, the latest album from Beyoncé, has sparked widespread debate about the genre of "country music". As a musicologist, I am fascinated with the construction of genres. Often the boundaries that we create between one type of music and another are opaque and do not stand up to much scrutiny. Music is routinely transferred from one social context to another, taking on new meaning in this process.

For example, in my own genre of Irish traditional music, a performer may learn a piece of western art music or a pop song. But to what genre does their interpretation belong? Does a piece of classical music performed in the rhythm of Irish traditional music cease to be "classical"? Or is it intrinsically "classical" because of the construction of the melody and harmony?

These sorts of questions are key in understanding Cowboy Carter and its importance in the future development of country music.

Identifying and understanding the various elements of a musical performance is part of the musicologist's job. Country music is defined by some broad themes, including instrumentation, the subjects of the songs and the venues in which it is usually performed. There are also more specific musical elements, such as chord structures, melodies and harmonies. But arguably, the accent of the singer is the most essential component of country music.

Accents and dialect help us to express our identity in everyday communication. Analysis of accents and dialects in turn can help us to interpret musical performance. We associate received pronunciation in English with western art music, while Irish traditional singers will typically use their own spoken accent, creating regional styles in the genre.

Accent - and style in general - can also change over time, as has been observed in the singing of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and more recently, The Arctic Monkeys.

One of the unifying pillars of style across the various sub genres of American country music is the sound of Southern American English (SAE). This is sometimes referred to as a southern "drawl" or "twang". SAE, in which plural "you" becomes "ya'll", and "all of you" becomes "all y'all", is also often synonymous with the "whiteness" of country music.

Although she speaks with a more southern accent, Beyoncé delivers much of her work in another dialect. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has been described as a crucial part of her " performative persona " and it is here, where AAVE converges with the musical formula of country music, that the real genius of Cowboy Carter emerges on tracks such as Texas Hold 'Em.

Banjo, finger style guitar and a soft drumbeat provide the musical backdrop for a song that expresses numerous lyrical tropes of country music (cards, whisky, hoedowns) encased in the use of AAVE. Examples of this are heard in the construction "Cause we survivin'" (instead of "we're surviving") and the pronunciation of "with you" ("wit choo").

In this song, Beyoncé playfully mixes aural identifiers of both "blackness" and "whiteness" to create something new.

More of this juxtaposition follows on the harrowing track Daughter. Beyoncé's vocal flexibility is also seen in consecutive tracks in the middle of the record. On Just For Fun she moves clearly towards the accent and style of duet partner Willie Jones, before having Miley Cyrus do the opposite on II Most Wanted.

At 78 minutes, Cowboy Carter is nearly as long as composer Dmitri Shostakovich's epic Seventh Symphony (1941) and has structural similarities to symphonic music too. There are clear "movements" within the work in which certain lyrical and musical ideas are grouped together.

For example, the opening five tracks serve as personal statement, announcing the artist's "country" credentials: "Used to say I spoke too country / And the rejection came, said I wasn't country 'nough." A second section sees Beyoncé develop these credentials, with endorsements from some of country's most celebrated artists, including Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton.

In Spaghettii there is a short explosion of drill music. Other more obviously hip-hop tracks are scattered throughout the rest of the record. Beyoncé explores multiple musical homes, including opera, and ultimately ends with a recapitulation of the opening song, Ameriican Requiem in the final track, Amen.

Subverting the genre

Beyoncé has deliberately set out to subvert conceptions of the genre with Cowboy Carter. As pioneering black country artist Linda Martell says during the opening to Spaghettii: "Genres are a funny little concept aren't they? Yes they are."

Martell returns later to introduce Ya, Ya, reminding the listener that the song "stretches across a range of genres". This never appears cynical, however, and the deeply personal and genuine creative power of the record is further revealed in the way that Beyoncé plays with lyrics and ideas elsewhere.

In her rewriting of Dolly Parton's Jolene, the narrator is transformed into a powerful a confident woman who successfully fends off the titular character's advances: "[I had to have this talk with you/'Cause I hate to have to act a fool/Your peace depends on how you move, Jolene]".

Read more: Beyoncé and Dolly Parton's versions of Jolene represent two sides of southern femininity

There are so many interesting things to say about this record, on which Beyoncé asks compelling questions about style and genre. What makes Cowboy Carter different from other groundbreaking records is that the artist offers us detailed and compelling explanations of her artistic rationale within the music.

Cowboy Carter reminds us that musical style is difficult to define. While record labels and streaming services rely on genre labels to power our consumer activities, these labels are entirely subjective for the listener. Ultimately, Cowboy Carter opens the door for musicians of all backgrounds to play with the accent, style and ideals of country music in their own way.

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The genius of Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé's accent - a musicologist explains

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Beyoncé playfully mixes aural identifiers of both 'blackness' and 'whiteness' to create something new

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An Art Newspaper article, arguing that attacking and damaging works of art in order to protest against issues such as the climate crisis achieves nothing. 

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An Art Newspaper article, arguing that attacking and damaging works of art in order to protest against issues such as the climate crisis achieves nothing. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Can the damage of art in the name of protest ever be justified?

KEY TERMS Civilised society, Pointless, Cultural violence, Iconoclasm

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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"Are you ready?" the curator said to a group of us huddled around a plastic crate covered by a tea towel. We nodded, and as he pulled back the tea towel, we saw Margaret Thatcher's decapitated head staring back at us, eyes pale and slightly crazed. Beside us was the rest of her in marble form, as a full-length statue by the sculptor Neil Simmons. Her handbag was still neatly clasped to her waist, but the break at her neck was as clean as a guillotine's chop.

It was 2002, and I had just started working for the late Labour MP Tony Banks, then in charge of the House of Commons Works of Art Committee. The statue had been commissioned to stand in the Members' Lobby, just outside the House of Commons. But because Thatcher was still alive, the committee wanted to loan the statue to the Guildhall Art Gallery until the day came when Parliament could suitably memorialise her in death, rather than be seen to lionise her in life. And it was at the Guildhall where, shortly after Simmons's work had been unveiled by Thatcher herself, the statue was attacked by a protester with a cricket bat.

Our job, as we huddled around Thatcher's severed head, was to wonder what to do next. In a statement, Banks said that while the statue ranked "among our most controversial commissions, acts of vandalism against works of art can never be tolerated in a civilised society". I remember he felt this genuinely, even though he had been among Thatcher's most effective and fervent Parliamentary critics. He recognised that allowing art, especially public art, to become a target of protest was always a thin-end-of-the-wedge moment.

Then the discussion turned to whether we should repair the statue. Practically, it looked possible, but politically it was another matter. Could the House of Commons really commemorate Thatcher with a statue that had once been decapitated? If it did, then the protester would be commemorated too, for the nature of his attack meant that art and act would forever be associated. And no matter how well the head was reattached, over time the join would become visible.

So it was decided that the statue could no longer go into parliament. A new statue, this time in bronze, was commissioned from Antony Dufort, and is now in the Members' Lobby. Simmons's (repaired) marble statue is still at the Guildhall, parked in a corridor.

More than 20 years on, I wonder what Thatcher's metaphorical executioner achieved. Is anybody more aware of Thatcher's controversial legacy? Did those affected by her policies have their lives improved? I doubt it. What might have felt, for a brief moment, like a radical, daring act, will be remembered for what it was: a pointless act of cultural violence.

Those who excuse such attacks point out that art and protest have long gone together, as if one iconoclasm justifies another. It must be tempting, if you support a protester's cause, to support their protest too. We have seen this with Just Stop Oil's pretend attacks in the Louvre, National Gallery and elsewhere. "Surely, the planet is more important than art," they say. And it is. If you could prove to me that climate change, or war in the Middle East, could be stopped by destroying a painting, I would throw the soup myself. But, as Tony Banks recognised, when looking at the severed head of his greatest political opponent, destroying art achieves nothing.

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'Why destroying art in protest achieves nothing'

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Activists' attacks on artworks do not further their causes-if they did, I would throw the soup myself

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An amNY article, reporting on a new immersive exhibition in New York that recreates the 7 October 2023 attack on the Israeli music festival.

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An amNY article, reporting on a new immersive exhibition in New York that recreates the 7 October 2023 attack on the Israeli music festival.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How can art help to bring about rehabilitation after traumatic events?

KEY TERMS Remembrance, Empower, Responsibly explore, Rehabilitation

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Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images for The Nova Music Festival Exhibition

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A new exhibition in NYC will honor and remember the lives lost at the Nova Music Festival after the terror group, Hamas, brutally attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 .

The Nova Music Festival Exhibition: October 7th 06:29am -The Moment Music Stood Still is now open and will run through May 23, 2024, in Manhattan's Financial District. It aims to be an in-depth remembrance of the terror attack that cut short a peaceful music festival in Israel, killing people of different ages and backgrounds.

Organized in part by American music exec, Scooter Braun, along with Nova Music Festival founders and other supporters, the exhibit is presented as a way to "empower visitors to responsibly explore the events of October 7 and its aftermath," according to its website.

Many people gathered to celebrate life and music at the festival in Re'im, Israel, on Saturday, Oct. 7, before it was brought to an end by Hamas terrorists, who invaded the country. The attacks resulted in 1,200 people killed, among them 370 festival-goers, as well as over 240 taken hostage, some of whom were subsequently released.

Personal items left behind during the attack

Artifacts from the tragic day will be on exhibit. Within a solemn space, visitors will see remnants salvaged from the festival grounds, including scorched cars, bullet-riddled bathroom stalls and personal belongings that were left behind.

Survivors of the attack will also be in attendance to share their first-hand testimonies as witnesses and victims.

Premiering in Tel Aviv for a span of 10 weeks, the Nova Music Festival Exhibition drew thousands who gave their respects to those who were killed in the attacks.

Braun, known for managing high-profile artists including Demi Lovato and Ariana Grande, worked with festival founders and other partners to bring the exhibit to the Big Apple. He called music a "safe space" and October 7 a day "tragically etched" into history.

"Bringing the Nova Music Festival to New York City honors those who were taken from us too soon, while reminding us of the progress we still need to make to bring the hostages home," Braun said. "The festival's message of peace for all sides will live on, despite the continued conflict abroad, as there are still innocent civilians being held hostage under horrific conditions in Gaza. We must not forget them, and we must bring back and reunite the innocent music lovers with their families."

Ofri Amir is one of the founders of the music festival. He worked with Reut Feingold, creator, director and writer of the exhibit, as well as others, to put it all together.

"I understood as part of our core values that we have to take care of our community and help lead in the rehabilitation of the Nova survivors, to commemorate the members of the tribe, and to make my voice heard to the whole world," Amir said.

What you need to know about visiting the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in NYC:

Where is the exhibit located?

The Nova Music Festival Exhibition in NYC is located at 35 Wall St., in Manhattan's Financial District .

What are the hours of operation?

The exhibit will run for four weeks, through May 23, 2024, and is open Sunday to Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Thursday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

How much are tickets?

Tickets are $1 with the option to add a donation.

How long does it take to explore the exhibit?

Organizers recommend visitors allocate at least an hour to walk through the exhibit.

For more information about the exhibit or to get tickets, visit the website.

Read more: Mets City Connect Uniforms: Tease Purple Debut | April 19

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Honoring Oct. 7 Victims: Nova Music Festival Exhibit in NYC

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Join us at the Nova Music Festival exhibit in NYC, honoring the memories of those lost on Oct. 7 due to Hamas, showcasing the power of music and remembrance.

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An ArtNet photo essay, looking at the four nominees for this year’s prestigious British Turner Prize.

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An ArtNet photo essay, looking at the four nominees for this year’s prestigious British Turner Prize.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Art “speaks imaginatively to how we might live together in a world increasingly marked by nationalism, division, and social control.” (Rosie Cooper). How successfully does it do this? Can you think of examples of art to support your answer? Is this the most important characteristic of a great work of art?

KEY TERMS Exploring questions, Identity, Unexamined histories, Freedom, Imaginatively, Division, Visual language

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Tate Britain has named Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur, and Delaine Le Bas as the four artists shortlisted for its annual Turner Prize. The U.K.'s most prestigious award for contemporary art is now in its 40th year and has, across the decades, spotlighted some of the country's biggest names, including Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, and Steve McQueen.

The winner of the Turner Prize, who receives £25,000 ($31,000), will be named at a ceremony at Tate Britain on December 3. A further £10,000 ($12,500) goes to each of the runner-up artists. An exhibition of works by all four artists will also open at the London museum from September 25 to February 16, 2025.

"This year's shortlisted artists can be broadly characterized as exploring questions of identity, autobiography, community, and self in relation to memory or history or myth," said Tate Britain's director Alex Farquharson at a press conference held at the museum this morning.

The Filipino artist Pio Abad, born in Manila in 1983, is nominated for the show "To Those Sitting in Darkness" at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The jury gushed over the sensitivity of his intricately detailed studies of cultural artefacts from museums around the city, drawing our attention to their capacity to contain personal resonance and memory.

"Its very much investigating museum histories, institutional histories, political histories, and Abad views the exhibition as an 'act of illumination that puts unexamined histories on display and addresses objects that have been confined to the margins of telling,'" said juror Sam Thorne, the director and CEO of Japan House London. He added that he was "particularly impressed by the depth and the range of the Ashmolean exhibition, by its precision, its elegance, and its blending of scholarship, draughtsmanship, collaboration, and curation."

With a knack for producing suggestive assemblages out of found objects, Jasleen Kaur, born in Glasgow in 1986, seems to carry some of the wry spirit of last year's winner Jesse Darling. She is nominated for her installation "Alter Altar" at Tramway in Glasgow, which uses the kind of everyday items that immediately evoke a certain time or place like a can of Irn-Bru or an old Ford Escort.

"Freedom, that idea of what that might mean individually and collectively was a really strong theme running throughout the exhibition," said juror Rosie Cooper, the director of Wysing Arts Center in Cambridge. "The jury felt that this significant breakthrough show was generous, celebratory, moving, and alive to timely issues, speaking imaginatively to how we might live together in a world increasingly marked by nationalism, division, and social control."

Another immersive installation by Delaine Le Bas garnered the attention of this year's judges. The artist, born in Worthing in 1965, is nominated for "Incipit Vita Nova. Here Beings the New Life/A New Life is Beginning" at Secession in Vienna. The space was animated by expressive sculpture and costume that wove together universal myth and lore with personal histories inspired by the loss of Le Bas's grandmother.

"Human animal hybrids were combined with mythical female figures and references to Gustav Klimt's famous Beethoven frieze," said Cooper. "The judges were really struck by the confidence of this exhibition, which we all felt signaled a real turning point in the artist's practice. A bold, powerful expression of Le Bas's highly distinctive visual language which has been developed over decades."

Artist Claudette Johnson is recognized for two major institutional moments last year: "Presence" at the Courtauld Gallery in London and "Drawn Out" at Ortuzar Projects in New York. Born in Manchester in 1959, she delves into art history and takes her pick, reinventing old tropes within her lively portraits of Black women, children, and men.

"The figures, typically identified from the titles as friends, look directly at the viewer, recreating an intimate encounter with the artist," said Thorne. "Johnson invests these pictures with a palpable sense of conviviality and vulnerability."

In addition to Thorne and Cooper, the jury for this year's Turner Prize also includes broadcaster Ekow Eshun, who recently curated "The Time is Always Now" at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the curator and art historian Lydia Yee, and Tate Britain's director, Alex Farquharson.
"Turner Prize 2024" will go on public view at Tate Britain in London from September 25 through February 16, 2025.

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Here Are the Artists Nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize

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Four prominent contemporary artists have been named as contenders for the U.K.'s esteemed Turner Prize, now in its 40th year.

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A NPR article, looking at the decision by the Chechnya government to ban all music that isn’t between 80 and 116 beats per minute.

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A NPR article, looking at the decision by the Chechnya government to ban all music that isn’t between 80 and 116 beats per minute.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE “Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” (Kahlil Gibran). Why might this ability of music be alarming to some political figures?

KEY TERMS Banning, Borrowing musical culture, Cultural heritage, Moral and ethical standards, Dissent

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Authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya are banning music they consider either too fast or too slow, effectively criminalizing many genres.

The Chechen Ministry of Culture announced the ban on its website last week, by the order of Culture Minister Musa Dadayev and with the agreement of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

"Musical, vocal and choreographic" works will be limited to a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM) to "conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm," said Dadayev, according to the Russian state-run news agency TASS.

"Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is inadmissible," Dadayev said, per a translation by The Guardian. "We must bring to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people. This includes the entire spectrum of moral and ethical standards of life for Chechens."

Russian media report that artists have until June 1 to rewrite any music that doesn't conform to the new rule, though it's not clear how it will be enforced.

Chechnya is a roughly 6,700-square-mile autonomous republic situated in the North Caucasus of southern Russia and home to some 1.5 million people, the vast majority of whom are Muslim. Its leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has consistently quashed dissent in the territory since he came to power in 2007 - nominated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom he remains close.

Over the years, dissidents, human rights activists and journalists - as well as their family members - in Chechnya have faced threats and reported instances of abduction, arbitrary detention and death. Chechen authorities also orchestrated what Human Rights Watch describes as "lethal purges of men perceived to be gay or bisexual" in 2017 and 2019. (Kadyrov said in 2017, "We don't have any gays ... If there are any, take them to Canada.")

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has said Kadyrov's regime "maintains hegemony through the imposition of a purported 'traditional' version of Islam, which falsely claims to defend local belief and culture, and combat violent extremism."

"In reality, Kadyrov has [co-opted] Chechen religion and culture to support his brutal regime, which violates the secular constitution of the Russian Federation and international standards of freedom of religion or belief," it added.

While Chechnya waged two wars against Russia for its independence in the 1990s and early 2000s, it remains part of Russia and is now seen as its close ally in the war against Ukraine. Even so, it's held on to its language and culture, in which folklore plays a major role. Traditional Chechen music includes instrumental songs and epic ballads, according to the Guardian.

The government's crackdown on certain musical tempos would silence most modern music genres. Electronic styles of music like house, techno and dubstep all tend to have BPMs of over 116, says the audio tech company Izotope, while the average tempo of 2020's best-selling pop songs was 122 BPM, according to the BBC.

The independent Russian news outlet Meduza said the tempo of the Russian national anthem would be considered too slow under the new limit, reports RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. But it would seem to permit hip-hop music, which generally has a BPM of 85 to 95.

Some songs that would fit the bill include Beyonce's "Texas Hold 'Em" (110 BPM), the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" (104 BPM), Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" (82 BPM), ABBA's "Dancing Queen" (101 BPM) and Taylor Swift's 10-minute version of "All Too Well" (94 BPM), among others.

Here are examples of songs that wouldn't:

Too slow:

"Little Wing" by Jimi Hendrix (71 BPM)

"Don't Worry Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin (69 BPM)

"Rehab" by Amy Winehouse (72 BPM)

"I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston (68 BPM)

"Imagine" by John Lennon (76 BPM)

"Hello" by Adele (79 BPM)

Too fast:

"Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles (129 BPM)

"Cruel Summer" by Taylor Swift (170 BPM)

"16 Carriages" by Beyonce (127 BPM)

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana (117 BPM)

"Toxic" by Britney Spears (143 BPM)

"Hotel California" by the Eagles (147 BPM)

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Chechnya is banning music that's too fast or slow. These songs wouldn't make the cut

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Authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya will only allow music between 80 and 116 beats per minute, though it's unclear how the rule will be enforced.

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A Guardian article, reporting on the story of a German gallery employee, who secretly displayed his own work of art alongside that of recognized artists. 

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A Guardian article, reporting on the story of a German gallery employee, who secretly displayed his own work of art alongside that of recognized artists. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” (Bertolt Brecht). How receptive is the art world to art corresponding to Brecht’s description?

KEY TERMS Brazen shot at fame vs. critical intervention, Provoke debate, Invisible, Elitism, Artistic challenge

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The first picture that greeted visitors to the first-floor exhibition space in Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne gallery on 23 February may not have immediately grabbed their attention.

The 60cm by 120cm artwork was a retro-looking photograph of a family of four, with the background and parts of the faces and bodies roughly painted over in white. It was unassuming compared with the video- and photo-based artworks in the adjacent rooms, but only on closer inspection might visitors have wondered why there was no label giving the artist or the work's title.

The real reason only became public last week: the nameless painting, the content of which has not been previously made public, was not the work of a modern master selected by the curators, but the creation of a 51-year-old technical worker employed by the museum, who had sneaked it into the show in the early hours of the morning.

The Pinakothek, which has one of Europe's largest collections of modern and contemporary art, removed the painting after closing time, sacked the technician and kept quiet about the incident.

Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne museum has a major collection of contemporary art. Photograph: FocusCulture/Alamy

When news of the stunt found its way to the German press via a police report last Monday, the museum downplayed it. "A little hoax, a trifling matter," a spokesperson said. A first report in Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper framed the incident as a wannabe-artist seeking an "artistic breakthrough" by putting himself in the company of Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys and others.

But museum insiders say that far from being a brazen shot at fame, the artwork was meant as a critical intervention by one of the people who help make exhibitions happen but usually remain invisible, designed to provoke debate about elitism in the art world.

Early reports failed to mention that the special exhibition in which the picture was hung was all about errors and malfunctions in art, and called Glitch: On the Art of Interference.

Its aim, according to the catalogue, was to "uncover normative orders and sociopolitical disparities" and "make visible what is invisible".

"The motive behind smuggling that picture into the exhibition was to see if the directors of the museum were prepared to practise what they preach", said one person familiar with the events. "It was an artistic challenge. The technician who hung up the picture wasn't lusting for fame."

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A sculpture by US artist John Chamberlain at Pinakothek der Moderne. Photograph: Urbanmyth/Alamy

The curator of the Glitch exhibition said developing the show had taught her to accept imperfections and accidents. "Who is to determine what is perfect?" she told Bavarian Sunday paper Sonntagsblatt. "When dealing with mishaps, it's quite possible to show a degree of serenity."

In dealing with an unwanted painting, however, the Pinakothek found serenity harder to come by. It said the technician, who worked part-time at the museum, had been barred from all Bavarian State Painting Collections galleries for three years and had signed a "dissolution agreement". These nullify an employee's contract, but often also contain confidentiality clauses.

So far, the technician-artist has neither been named nor commented on the affair. A spokesperson for the Pinakothek last week declined to either name the employee nor describe his picture, for fear of "encouraging copycat pranksters".

In a statement later in the week, the museum rejected the idea that hanging the picture was an "artistic intervention", because no hurdles had been overcome; it was merely a breach of trust.

"Employees must comply with security concepts and not jeopardise valuable cultural heritage," it added. A criminal complaint against the technician for damage to property was withdrawn in March.

The Pinakothek did not respond when asked if its dealings with the affair were at odds with the message of its exhibition.

Curators of an exhibition in Bonn last year took a very different approach. When taking down a temporary exhibition entitled Who We Are - Reflecting a Country of Immigration, they were surprised to find an extra painting on their hands. They put out a message on social media saying: "We think this is funny and would like to know the artist. So get in touch! There will be no trouble. Word of honour."

The artist, Danai Emmanouilidis, came forward and saw her painting fetch €3,696 at auction in Cologne.

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Revealed: the picture sneaked by employee into a German gallery

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Technician, who hung his own picture in an exhibition about art world glitches, has been sacked and given a three-year ban

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A Guardian article, looking at how rap music has changed the way young people throughout the UK use language. 

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A Guardian article, looking at how rap music has changed the way young people throughout the UK use language. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE “It’s like a tide. You’ve got a big wave coming in, and that dies down, but the tide is still moving in that direction.” (Rob Drummond, socio-linguist). How does this describe the way language evolves over time? Hint - use the word ‘standardised’ in your response.

KEY TERMS Multicultural London English, Vernaculars, Cultural orientation, Edginess and rebelliousness, Covert prestige, Standardised

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here's a video format spreading on TikTok. Recorded in towns across suburban England, teenage interviewers stop their peers on the street, fielding questions that range from fashion choices to humorous hypotheticals and local neighbourhood dramas, in the process building a large social media following and showcasing their patch of land to the world. "950 [pounds] for that, you know my ting," a teenage white boy says about his Canada Goose jacket in a video recorded in Bury St Edmunds. "We're checking his drip, ya dun know, you heard my man," someone says in another video.

Both the hosts and many of the interviewees speak with this distinct drawl - Multicultural London English (MLE), a dialect born in London's African-Caribbean communities in the 1970s and 80s. (Some now argue that "Black British English" is a more fitting term.) It's rooted in Jamaican patois with influences from cockney, and more recently Arabic, the US and West African Pidgin English.

A primary cause of this spread - which goes beyond viral TikToks - is British rap, with drill, grime and more taking new linguistic styles to the far corners of the country. In some cases, the entire cultural spread of MLE is contained in a single song. "I'm giving them UK slang / My brudda, my fam, my akh / You say: 'The feds just done a sweep' / We say, 'The boy dem run in my gaff'," Central Cee rapped in a 2022 freestyle, nodding to patois, cockney and Arabic respectively - akh is an Arabic word that has fed into MLE from the British Somali community, who are among both the largest Muslim and Black communities in Britain. Elsewhere, west African slang and dialects have continued to creep into British rap. Drizzled on to songs by the likes of Skepta, J Hus and NSG, terms such as wahala (trouble), "let me land" (let me finish) and juju (ancient African spiritual belief systems) are a reflection of how African communities are carving themselves deeply into British soil.

"You have quite a long history of British vernaculars being exported through British cultural forms," says Christian Ilbury, a lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh - from Scouse accents with the Beatles to Arctic Monkeys and the presence of industrial working-class accents in indie music. "Grime essentially became the vehicle in which we perceived MLE." Those kids in suburban England, he says, "don't speak this variety because of where they grew up. They're using it to align with a cultural orientation that they appreciate."

In recent years, the audience for UK rap has broadened, flowing out of inner cities. Key to its spread was the internet, which tore down the music industry's traditional barriers to access and spread this new way of speaking. "Social media has played a huge role," says Rob Drummond, professor of sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. "Everybody can access everything, so it's going to spread faster. Young people are maintaining communication all the time through Snapchat and WhatsApp. It makes it much more immersive and immediate."

Ilbury agrees: "With social media, you get representations of MLE that transcend geographical boundaries."

Also key is the particular appeal of Black pop culture, as defined by US writer and activist Kevin Powell in a September 2000 interview with Time: "You cannot discuss Black music without taking into account its edginess ... its rebelliousness ... and the fact that edginess and rebelliousness ultimately appeals to white young people as much as it does to Black young people."

That dynamic took root in Britain in the 1970s, when various forms of reggae - also subversive and at times perceived as anti-establishment - became distinctly British iterations of a Black coolness that appealed to younger white audiences.

In the early 70s, slang in wider London revolved heavily around "East End, white working-class slang, with some Yiddish and with some [Romany-derived queer slang] Polari," says Tony Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King's College London. Things began to shift in the middle of the decade, he says, when "a lot of younger white kids got into reggae and later into dancehall and dub," and started to "pick up slang that wasn't from the old varieties". They were leaning into the patois present in the music, and subsequently in MLE, with phrases like "yard' (house) and "babylon" (establishment or police).

They were leaning into the patois present in the music, and subsequently in MLE. "Jamaican culture in London," says Thorne, was perceived as "super cool. The mods loved it, then later skinheads and punks loved it." He remembers the music spreading into London's whiter suburbs, but not reaching further because the genres "weren't really global at all, they were still local" - and there was no internet to spread them onward.

Now, with digitally distributed British rap speaking to an expanded audience, this dynamic has started to play out nationally. When grime erupted in 2014, it arrived with a distinct sense of fashion and language - words like "bait", "gassed" and "ends", as well as distinct attire consisting of tracksuits and streetwear. It was more than just a genre: it was a culture. "And how do you express your alignment with grime music?" says Ilbury. "You start speaking in a way that sounds like MLE." Since then, drill and a new generation of UK rappers have arrived with a similar impact: words such as ting and certi (certified) ever-present in the sound, alongside streetwear brands including Trapstar, Hoodrich and Corteiz. Ronan Bennett's TV drama series Top Boy has also become enormously popular.

Many of the most high-profile British rappers of recent times have been men, so MLE "is often heard as extremely masculine" by wider Britain, Ilbury notes, and therefore, "often associated with young men". As a result, the dialect seems to have resonated more strongly with teenage boys in the suburbs. Drummond says that the music, and therefore the language associated with it, carries for young men in these regions, "what we might in linguistics call a 'covert prestige'".

In Drummond's field studies in Manchester, he noticed that the dialect was more likely to be used by boys, with girls maintaining their more regional ways of communicating. "Using particular ways of speaking for these young people, especially young men, is a way of performing an identity," he says. "But unfortunately, it comes with a whole load of baggage that maybe they're not quite ready for."

These developments come with questions of cultural appropriation. They also highlight the racially loaded demonisation of MLE as a language associated with "roadmen", where in increasingly popular TikTok and Instagram skits, "roadman" has become a byword for low intelligence and stupidity.

Linguists note that many of these young white men from middle England are likely to drop MLE when they move into more professional environments. But MLE's current popularity will likely leave a permanent mark, with the dialect already becoming a standardised part of white British speech. "Even when they dial it down because they get a nice responsible job in a bank, there's still a fundamental change," Drummond says. "It's like a tide. You've got a big wave coming in, and that dies down, but the tide is still moving in that direction."

Aniefiok Ekpoudom is a writer from south London. His first book, Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain, is a social history of British rap. To support theGuardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Bait, ting, certi: how UK rap changed the language of the nation

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Fuelled by music fandom and social media, young British people's slang is evolving to include words with pidgin, patois and Arabic roots - even where strong regional English dialects exist

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A Guardian article, exploring how a Cardiff museum has borrowed a Van Gogh self-portrait, and is exhibiting it as ‘the original selfie’. 

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A Guardian article, exploring how a Cardiff museum has borrowed a Van Gogh self-portrait, and is exhibiting it as ‘the original selfie’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE (How) can art from the past help us to explore ideas and concepts in the present?

KEY TERMS Who you are as a person, Characterize, Iconic works, Inner life’s landscape, Perspective

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Are self-portraits the predecessors of modern-day selfies? What if they're created by renowned artists like Vincent van Gogh?

The National Museum Cardiff has decided to explore this question in a new exhibition, " Art of the Selfie." The show is built around the Dutch painter's Portrait of the Artist (1887), which is now on display in Wales for the first time.

"Self-portraits and selfies are two different things, but they do have something in common: Both are used to show who you are as a person," the museum writes on its website. "Out of all the ways we document our lives, selfies have become a popular method of self-expression and individualism. The works on display show the different ways in which artists have chosen to characterize themselves in the same way we present and share images of ourselves today."

Portrait of the Artist is on loan as part of a trade with Paris' Musée d'Orsay, which had previously asked to borrow Renoir's The Blue Ladyfor its upcoming exhibition, " Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism."

" The Blue Lady was painted in 1874, so it just made sense we should allow her to go back to her birthplace, go on her holidays with old friends," Kath Davies, director of collections and research at Museum Wales, tells the 's Steven Morris. "But she was going to leave a gap. So we suggested: If you're taking one of our iconic works, could you reciprocate and send something that's really meaningful, one of your star objects?"

Van Gogh created around 35 self-portraits, many of which he completed because he was strapped for cash and couldn't afford to hire a model. Despite these circumstances, the artist poured himself into these vivid, colorful works of introspection, which he saw as a vehicle to communicate certain ineffable qualities of his inner life's landscape.

"I am looking for a deeper likeness than that obtained by a photographer," van Gogh once wrote to his sister. In a letter to his brother, he added: "People say-and I'm quite willing to believe it-that it's difficult to know oneself-but it's not easy to paint oneself either."

"Art of the Selfie" features about a dozen pieces, showcasing how various artists-including Rembrandt, Brenda Chamberlain, Francis Bacon and Bedwyr Williams -have approached the task of depicting themselves in their work.

One of the self-portraits on view is by Anya Paintsil, a contemporary artist who draws on her Welsh and Ghanaian heritage. Her contribution is a textile piece that portrays her as Blodeuwedd, a character made of flowers from Welsh folklore.

This piece provides a "different perspective of what self-portrait might mean," Dawn Bowden, Wales' deputy minister for culture and sport, tells BBC News.

She adds: "This is a really small exhibition and so intimate that it gives you the time to explore the works in depth. There are only 14 works here, but each one brings a different perspective."
"Art of the Selfie" is on view at the National Museum Cardiff in Wales through January 26, 2025.

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A Vincent van Gogh Self-Portrait Is at the Center of a New Exhibition on the 'Art of the Selfie'

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The National Museum Cardiff is encouraging visitors to snap photos with the 1887 artwork, which is on view in Wales for the first time

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A short Guardian ‘experience’ article, describing how and why a Chilean student stole a Rodin sculpture from a Santiago museum. 

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A short Guardian ‘experience’ article, describing how and why a Chilean student stole a Rodin sculpture from a Santiago museum. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is there a line between social protest and artistic expression? If so, who decides where it lies?

KEY TERMS Artistic intervention, Punk, Implications, Concept of absence

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I was an art student in Santiago, Chile, when I was invited to the National Museum of Fine Arts for a private event in June 2005. I had some drinks and needed the bathroom, which was downstairs.

On the way, I went into a very dark room - I couldn't even see the palms of my hands. Then, unknowingly, I walked into Rodin's Torso of Adele, a small sculpture that is just 11cm high and 37.5cm wide. When I touched it, it was cold. It was the first time Rodin had been exhibited in Chile.

I didn't even think - it was now or never. I held the work in my hands, and nothing happened. So I just took it, put it in my bag, and left feeling excited and emotional.

I had previously thought of taking an artwork from a museum to see how the public would react. Theft is all across this country - Chilean politicians have been plundering for years. So I thought: why not explore theft almost as if it were an artistic intervention, and see what happens next?My life at the time was quite punk. I was in a rock band and interested in radical artistic ideas.

I hadn't thought specifically of taking the Rodin, it was just a general idea. That night, all the factors combined to make me do it. There was no alarm, no cameras.

I went home and poured myself a glass of wine. I began to sketch the sculpture on my easel. I saw Rodin's signature on it. It was spectacular, and I felt so fortunate, an observer of a great story. After a few hours of sketching, I went to bed and slept well.

The next day was cold, damp and cloudy. I turned on the television and saw the news. It was chaos. It was the biggest news story in Chile: a work had been taken from the National Museum of Fine Arts.

That's when I began to fear the legal implications. I went to the police station to return the Torso of Adele and, at first, told them I had found the sculpture in the park. I never wanted to be in the middle of the action - I just wanted to see what would happen next. But I decided it wouldn't make sense to lie, so I later told them I was a student, and that this was an artistic action. The officer said, "That's brilliant."

I spent the night in a holding cell. There, one policeman told me I had stained Chile's reputation. But I never regretted anything. There were concerns the work was damaged, and they checked that it was fine. But I was not going to destroy an artwork - I treated it carefully.

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When the police went to my house, I showed them a document on my computer where I had written down early plans to take an artwork, with the phrase: "Loss returns the memory of something that is not there." In a world full of content, I wanted to explore the idea of, rather than bringing something into a museum, doing the opposite. After I took the sculpture, the exhibition was suspended and later reopened without the Torso of Adele, but many people still queued to see the empty plinth. I like to think people in Chile are closer to the piece because of what I did.

The legal fallout was long and uncomfortable. I had to speak to lawyers, prepare my case, and eventually go to court. Journalists would wait outside my house to take pictures of me. At the hearing, the judge agreed that my action was art. That was fantastic, though I had to spend 10 months volunteering for six hours a week in the library of Santiago's main prison.

My action divided people at my university. Some supported it, others didn't. They suspended my studies, so I went to a different university. There I met a fantastic artist who became a mentor to me.

Nearly 20 years on, at the age of 38, I am at a more mature stage of my artistic life.I am still creating art, under a pen name of sorts; I've made photography that explores the concept of death, and I'm creating a conceptual book with blank pages and hidden texts. I've been invited to exhibit some of my work in Argentina. I won't say too much, but it's an installation featuring whites on top of whites, tied to the concept of absence. I've always been fascinated by that, but I am not interested in taking anything else from a museum - for now.

As told to Charis McGowan

Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@theguardian.com

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Experience: I stole a Rodin sculpture from a museum

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I held it and nothing happened. So I just took it, put it in my bag and left

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A BBC article, exploring the identity of Banksy, the British street artist.

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A BBC article, exploring the identity of Banksy, the British street artist.

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His latest pieces of artwork - sprayed on walls in East Anglia - have yet again attracted global attention.

He's one of the world's most famous artists, but despite his worldwide following his identity remains, officially at least, unknown.

Often described as "elusive" and "secretive" by the press, the "guerrilla street artist" counts A-list celebrities among his fans.

A hero to some, a vandal to others, his artworks sell for eye-watering sums, with councils and landowners rushing to profit from - or whitewash - buildings chosen as his latest canvas.

And yet, the self-styled prankster and anti-establishment figure has consistently managed to stay anonymous.

But what do we actually know about him?

Early career

Banksy rose to prominence after he began spray-painting his trademark stencilled designs around Bristol in the early 1990s.

The city's influential music and arts scene - which birthed acts such as Massive Attack and Portishead - is said to have inspired his work.

Banksy himself is believed to have been born in the nearby town of Yate, South Gloucestershire, in the early 1970s.

His first large stencil mural - The Mild Mild West - which depicts a teddy bear throwing a Molotov cocktail at three riot police, was painted in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol in 1999.

In the early 2000s he moved to London and continued to attract attention with his trademark stencilled artwork.

By the mid 2000s Banksy was becoming a celebrity himself.

His works became more ambitious, popping up in cities all over the world.

Each new piece became a newsworthy event and the myth of him as a masked, anonymous Robin Hood-type character poking fun at the powers-that-be began to emerge.

His works began to sell for huge amounts of money, with customers including Paul Smith, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Christina Aguilera.

He began to stage exhibitions of his work, putting on sell-out events in cities including Los Angeles and London - and later his hometown of Bristol.

His 2010 documentary film Exit Through The Gift Shop - showing Banksy at work - was nominated for an Academy Award and a Bafta.

Banksy unmasked?

Quite a few names have been linked with Banksy in the past: Robert Del Naja, Robin Gunningham, Art Attack's Neil Buchanan or a Bristol art collective?

The Mail on Sunday claimed in what it called a world exclusive expose that Banksy is a "former public schoolboy brought up in middle-class suburbia" called Robin Gunningham.

A book of photos recently released by Banksy's former agent, Steve Lazarides, claims to show the artist at work, although none showed his face.

Mr Gunningham has never commented on the speculation.

Robert Del Naja, of Bristol trip-hop group Massive Attack, has also been linked.

The vocalist, better known as 3D, has denied this, although has claimed to know the identity of the "real" Banksy, referring to him as a friend.

Could that friend be Neil Buchanan, host of ITV show Art Attack? He was forced to deny any links to Banksy after a suggestion he was behind the spray cans started to trend on social media.

Another possibility is that Banksy is actually not one person but many, who operate as an art collective.

Of course, all of the above could be false trails, in the hope to throw us all off the name of real artist.

Banksy's notoriously tight-lipped PR reps refused, once again, to be drawn on his true identity.

A summer spraycation

Banksy's work has come to the fore again in recent days after 10 pieces of street art appeared across Suffolk and Norfolk.

People have flocked to see his "Great British Spraycation" street art, with designs adorning streets in Great Yarmouth, Gorleston and Cromer in Norfolk; and Lowestoft and Oulton Broad in Suffolk.

Speculation was rife about if the work was indeed Banksy's for several days after the artwork was spotted, before the artist himself confirmed it was his through a video on his Instagram page.

The designs in the East Anglian coastal towns have a suitably seaside feel, with seagulls dive-bombing for chips, children playing with sand and in boats, as well as a rat leaning back in a deckchair while enjoying a cocktail.

A miniature stable at Merrivale Model Village has also been given the Banksy treatment, with the wording "Go big or go home" sprayed on to it.

What if he was unmasked?

John Brandler, director of Brandler Art Galleries, said it was convenient for Banksy to remain anonymous "so he can walk down the street" without being recognised.

"But to the art world it doesn't matter any more. The brand is so big now. His people have made the brand Banksy such an incredible thing, it wouldn't make any difference now [if he was unmasked].

"His statements are so strong. It's brilliant marketing. People are buying by brand.

"[When he started] being anonymous helped him stand out - the masked crusader - but now it doesn't matter any more.

"He's very clever. He hasn't flooded the market. He's a brilliant businessman."

Follow BBC West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: bristol@bbc.co.uk

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

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Banksy: What do we know about the anonymous artist?

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The graffiti artist Banksy is world famous, but his true identity remains unknown.

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A Big Think article, exploring the extent to which dystopian sci-fi representations of the future undermine our ability to create more positive futures.

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A Big Think article, exploring the extent to which dystopian sci-fi representations of the future undermine our ability to create more positive futures.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What do popular culture representations of the future tell us about the relationship we have with the present?

KEY TERMS Anti-anti-progress, Demoralization campaign, Countercultural hostility, Radical pessimism, Responsibility, Truth, Power

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Are fictional dystopias blocking us from better futures?

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Do grim sci-fi visions crush our dreams of a better future? Author Michael Harris thinks something else is going on.

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A Conversation article, in which a professor of literature argues that the work of Taylor Swift should be taught alongside that of Shakespeare.

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A Conversation article, in which a professor of literature argues that the work of Taylor Swift should be taught alongside that of Shakespeare.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE “There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift’s Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together. There’s no dumbing-down involved. And there’s no need for reductive assertions about who is better.” Why does Liam E Semler believe this? Do you agree? How does it make you rethink your original response?

KEY TERMS Test of time, Assumptions, Process of crafting, Open-minded, Boundaries, Lived experience, Power, Metaphor, Reductive

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Does Taylor Swift's music belong in the English classroom? No, obviously. We should teach the classics, like Shakespeare's Sonnets. After all, they have stood the test of time. It's 2024 and he was born in 1564, and she's only 34. What's more, she is a pop singer, not a poet. Sliding her into the classroom would be yet another example of a dumbed-down curriculum. It's ridiculous. It makes everyone look bad.

I've heard all that. And plenty more like it. But none of it is right. Well, the dates might be, but not the assumptions - about Shakespeare, about English, about teaching, and about Swift.

Swift is, by the way, a poet. She sees herself this way and her songs bear her out. In Sweet Nothing, on the Midnights album, she sings:

On the way home
I wrote a poem
You say "What a mind"
This happens all the time.

I'm sure it does. Swift is relentlessly productive as a songwriter. With Midnights, she picked up her fourth Grammy for Album of the Year. And here we are, on the brink of another studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, somehow written and produced amid the gargantuan success of Midnights and the Eras World Tour.

Read more: How did Taylor Swift get so popular? She never goes out of style

An ally of literature

Regardless of what The Tortured Poets Department ends up being about, Swift is already a firm ally of literature and reading. She is a donor of thousands of books to public libraries in the United States, an advocate to schoolchildren of the importance of reading and songwriting, and a lover of the process of crafting lyrics.

In a 2016 Vogue interview, Swift declared with glee that, if she were a teacher, she would teach English. The literary references in her songs are endlessly noted. "I love Shakespeare as much as the next girl," she wrote in a 2019 article for Elle.

Her interview Read Every Day gives a good sense of this. Swift speaks about her writing process in ways that make it accessible. She explains how songs come to her anywhere and everywhere, like an idea randomly appearing "on a cloud" that becomes the first piece in a "puzzle" that will be assembled into a song. She furtively whisper-sings song ideas into her phone when out with friends.

In her acceptance speech for the Nashville Songwriter-Artist of the Decade Award in 2022, Swift explained how she writes in three broad styles, imagining she is holding either a "quill", a "fountain pen", or a "glitter gel pen". Songcraft is a joyous challenge for her.

If, as teachers of literature, we are too proud to credit Swift's plainly expressed love of English (regardless of whether we like her songs or not), we are likely missing something. To bluntly rule her out of the English classroom feels more absurd than allowing her in.

Clio Doyle, a lecturer in early modern literature, has summarised Swift's suitability for English in a recent article which concludes:

The important thing isn't whether or not Swift might be the new Shakespeare. It's that the discipline of English literature is flexible, capacious and open-minded. A class on reading Swift's work as literature is just another English class, because every English class requires grappling with the idea of reading anything as literature. Even Shakespeare.

Doyle reminds us Swift's work has been taught at universities for a while now and, inevitably, the singer's name keeps cropping up in relation to Shakespeare. This isn't just a case of fandom gone wild or Shakespeare professors, like Jonathan Bate, gone rogue.

The global interest in the world-first academic Swiftposium is a good measure of how things are trending. Moreover, it is wrong to think Swift's songs are included in units of study purely to be adored. Her wide appeal is part of her appeal to educators, but that doesn't mean her art is uncritically included.

The reverse is true. Claire Hansen taught Swift in one of her literature units at the Australian National University last year precisely because this influential singer-songwriter prompts students to explore the boundaries of the canon.

I will be teaching Midnights and Shakespeare's Sonnets together in a literature unit at the University of Sydney this semester. Why? Not because I think Swift is as good as Shakespeare, or because I think she is not as good as Shakespeare. These statements are fine as personal opinions, but unhelpful as blanket declarations without context. The nature of English as a discipline is far more complex, interesting and valuable than a labelling and ranking exercise.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Shakespeare's sonnets - an honest account of love and a surprising portal to the man himself

Teaching Midnights and Shakespeare's Sonnets

I teach Shakespeare's sonnets as exquisite poems, reflective of their time and culture. I also teach three modern artworks that shed contemporary light on the sonnets.

The first is Jen Bervin's 2004 book Nets. Bervin prints a selection of the sonnets, one per page, in grey text. In each of these grey sonnets, some of Shakespeare's words and phrases are printed in black and thus stand out boldly.

The result is a palimpsest. The Shakespearean sonnet appears lying, like fertile soil, beneath the briefer poem that emerges from it. Bervin describes this technique as a stripping down of the sonnets to "nets" in order "to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible - a divergent elsewhere". The creative relationship between the Shakespearean base and Bervin's proverb-like poems proves that, as Bervin says, "when we write poems, the history of poetry is with us".

The second text is Luke Kennard's prizewinning 2021 collection Notes on the Sonnets. Kennard recasts the sonnets as a series of entertaining prose poems. Each poem responds to a specific Shakespearean sonnet, recasting it as the freewheeling thought bubble of a fictional attendee at an unappealing house party. In an interview with C.D. Rose, Kennard explains how his house party design puts the reader

in between a public and private space, you're at home and you're out, you're free, you're enclosed. And that's similar in the sonnets.

The third text is Swift's Midnights. Unlike Bervin's and Kennard's collections, in which individual pieces relate to specific sonnets, there is no explicit adaptation. Instead, Midnights raises broader themes.

Deep connection

In her Elle article, Swift describes songwriting as akin to photography. She strives to capture moments of lived experience:

The fun challenge of writing a pop song is squeezing those evocative details into the catchiest melody you can possibly think of. I thrive on the challenge of sprinkling personal mementos and shreds of reality into a genre of music that is universally known for being, well, universal.

Her point is that the pop songs that "cut through the most are actually the most detailed" in their snippets of reality and biography. She says "people are reaching out for connection and comfort" and "music lovers want some biographical glimpse into the world of our narrator, a hole in the emotional walls people put up around themselves to survive".

Midnights exemplifies this. It is a concept album built on the idea that midnight is a time for pursuit of and confrontation with the self - or better, the selves. Swift says the songs form "the full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour".

The album, she says, is "a journey through terrors and sweet dreams" for those "who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching - hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve [...] we'll meet ourselves".
Swift claims that Midnights lets listeners in through her protective walls to enable deep connection:

I really don't think I've delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before. I struggle with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized and [...] I just struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person.

Midnights is not a sonnet collection, but it has fascinating parallels. There is no firm narrative through-line. Nor is there a through-line in early modern sonnet collections such as Shakespeare's. Instead, both gather songs and poems that let us see aspects of the singing or speaking persona's thoughts, emotions and experiences. Shakespeare's speaker is also troubled through the night in sonnets 27, 43 and 61.

The sonnets come in thematic clusters, pairs and mini-sequences. It can be interesting to ask students if they can see something similar in the order of songs on the Midnights album - or the "3am" edition with its seven extra tracks, or the "Til Dawn" edition with another three songs.

Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, in their edition of All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, say Shakespeare's collection is "the most idiosyncratic gathering of sonnets in the period" because he "uses the sonnet form to work out his intimate thoughts and feelings".

This connects very well with the agenda of Midnights. Both collections are piecemeal psychic landscapes. The singing or speaking voice sometimes feels autobiographical - compare, for example, sonnets 23, 129, 135-6 and 145 to Swift's songs Anti-hero, You're On Your Own, Kid, Sweet Nothing, and Would've, Could've, Should've. At other times the voices feel less autobiographical. Often there is no way to distinguish one from the other.

Swift's songs and Shakespeare's Sonnets are meditations on deeply personal aspects of their narrators' experiences. They present us with encounters, memories, relationships, values and claims. Swift's persona is that of a self-reflective singer, just as Shakespeare's is that of a self-reflective sonneteer. Both focus on love in all its shades. Both present themselves as vulnerable to industry rivals and pressures. Both dwell on issues of power.

Close reading

Shakespeare's sonnets are rewarding texts for close reading because of their poetic intricacy. Students can look at end rhymes and internal rhymes, the way the argument progresses through quatrains, the positioning of the "turn", which is often in line 9 or 13, and the way the final couplet wraps things up (or doesn't).

The songs on Midnights are also rewarding because Swift has a great vocabulary, a love of metaphor, terrific turns of phrase, and a strong sense of symmetry and balance in wording. More complex songs like Maroon and Question...? are great for detailed analysis.

Karma and Mastermind are simpler, yet contain plenty of metaphoric language to be unpacked for meaning and aesthetic effectiveness. Shakespeare's controlled use of metaphor in Sonnet 73 makes for a telling contrast.

The Great War, Glitch and Snow on the Beach are good for exploring how well a single extended metaphor can function to carry the meaning of a song. Sonnets 8, 18, 143 and 147 can be explored in similar terms.

Just as students can analyse the "turn" or concluding couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet to see how it reshapes the poem, they can do the same with songs on Midnights. Swift is known for writing effective bridges that contribute fresh, important content towards the end of a song: Sweet Nothing, Mastermind and Dear Reader are excellent examples.

Such unexpected pairings are valuable because they require close attention and careful articulation of what is similar and what is not. Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, for example (the famous one on lust), and Swift's Bigger than the Whole Sky (a powerful expression of loss) make for a gripping comparison of how intense feeling can be expressed poetically.

Or consider Sonnet 29 ("When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes") and Sweet Nothing: both celebrate intimacy as a defence against the pressures of the public world. How about High Infidelity and Sonnet 138 (where love and self-deception coexist), considered in terms of truth in relationships?

There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift's Midnights and Shakespeare's Sonnets together. There's no dumbing-down involved. And there's no need for reductive assertions about who is "better".

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Should Taylor Swift be taught alongside Shakespeare? A professor of literature says yes

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There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift's Midnights and Shakespeare's Sonnets together. There's no dumbing-down, and no need for reductive assertions about who is "better".

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A Guardian article, which suggests that the arts provide us with more insight into what’s going on in Ukraine than usual news bulletins. 

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A Guardian article, which suggests that the arts provide us with more insight into what’s going on in Ukraine than usual news bulletins. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE “Human “reality” does not consist only in the external world going about its rational business, but in our imaginations.” (Deborah Levy) Do you agree that to fully understand reality, we need to consult artistic as well as news sources?

KEY TERMS Homes and hearts, Behind the lines, Immediate and instructive, Witness to experience

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Russia's war against Ukraine has never been only about territory and artillery, about politicians and putative peace deals. Of course, that is the easiest and most acceptable register in which to consider unthinkable violence: as a geopolitical problem happening at a far distance. But Russia's aggression is an event of shocking magnitude in every individual life in Ukraine, and in lives elsewhere, too. The war is not only happening on the frontline but in homes and hearts. Deaths are mourned. Lives that were once straightforward have been propelled into directions that were never sought or wanted. Ambitions have been abandoned and plans have been cast aside. The war has crept like a mist into every chink of domestic life, into the tender, tremulous matters of love and sex, into the school day where cheerful young Ukrainian kids, alongside maths and English, get lessons on never, ever touching something that might be a mine.

"What we don't see in the news headlines is conversations around the kitchen table - families discussing, for example, how much fuel they would need if they suddenly had to flee to Warsaw," said Uilleam Blacker, associate professor of Ukrainian and East European culture at University College London, at an event last week. To come close to the feeling and texture of war as it is lived behind the lines - and behind front doors - it is necessary to turn to the work of Ukrainian artists, writers, playwrights and filmmakers. Blacker was in conversation with Natalya Vorozhbit, one of Ukraine's most significant playwrights, and Molly Flynn, the editor of a new anthology of Ukrainian plays in English translation, which were all written in the wake of the Maidan protests a decade ago. Since then, Ukraine has seen an efflorescence of documentary theatre, often rapid and reactive, and centred on ordinary lives - work that has formed a kind of artistic parallel to Ukraine's vigorous civil society.

This writing has been grounded in realism, but not always in expected ways. Vorozhbit's play Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha, written in 2014, deals with a family coping with the death, in the war in the Donbas, of Sasha, a father and husband. The play starts after his death; his presence is initially a portrait on the wall. Then he begins to speak: a ghost, if you like. British author Deborah Levy once described how human "reality" does not consist only in the external world going about its rational business, but in our imaginations, thoughts and fantasies, which are also real events in our lives. Through our daydreams and reveries, we can time travel, talk to, and be addressed by, the dead. Such things are not the material of sober reports or news bulletins, but they are as meaningful, and they are the territory of art.

A scene from 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Mstyslav Chernov. Photograph: Mstyslav Chernov/AP

In Kyiv last autumn, I met a group of playwrights who were debating how to write in the thick of the full-scale war. In the immediate wake of 24 February 2022, it had felt difficult, and perhaps unimportant, to write at all, they told me: the focus was on how to survive. In the months that followed, though, there was an outpouring of documentary theatre, closely based on real accounts of stories of escape and survival. And last year, they told me, they detected a fresh turn in Ukrainian theatre. Some playwrights were using comedy in their work, some fantasy, some even forms of sci-fi. Playwright Oksana Grytsenko told me she was writing a play about Ukraine's toppled statues of writer Alexander Pushkin coming alive to join the Russian military. When life is turned on its head, surreality and metaphor might provide the only accurate way to express a situation. Similarly, poetry is flourishing in Ukraine: it is the medium capable of expressing how violence explodes meaning; how it cuts into and unravels the plot coherence of individuals' lives.

You might think that reading a poem about the war, or looking at a painting or watching a film, might somehow be a secondary experience, less immediate and instructive than, say, watching the news. I suspect the opposite is true: in the hands of a good artist, you can be plunged into the life of another human, all distance eradicated, all boundaries collapsed. This can be extraordinarily painful, as in the Bafta-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, whose director, Mstyslav Chernov, thrusts the viewer right inside the besieged city. Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk wrote a poem recently, which Blacker translated last week. It begins by considering a scene of recent horror and death. "Watching from afar, you can always stop in time, / not get too close, where the eye sees too much". Literature, she writes, can edge us towards a position where we can absorb what might otherwise be unendurable details: "The child's shoe, which flew into the air from the child's foot, / when they were mixed with the shards of glass and concrete, the women's broken fingernail emerging from the rubble, / the unblurred remains of the body". A poem can offer a way of seeing an unblurred reality, in its bright and painful glare, Kruk suggests: the boundaries of artistic form contain it, and make it - just - bearable to see.

I think a lot about the tender paintings by Lucy Ivanova I saw last month in an exhibition at the Jam Factory, a newly opened arts centre in Lviv. Using the simple means at her disposal - small canvases, sketchbooks - she painted the most intimate scenes: her husband Yehor scrolling through the news, or sitting on the edge of the bed; the two of them naked, she heavily pregnant, in the kitchen of a temporary apartment; later, her son Sava at five days old. These works of art are also a witness to experience and the foundations of cultural memory. This, too, is the war.

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Art shows the surreal reality of wartime Ukraine in a way the news never could | Charlotte Higgins

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Reading a poem about the war may seem less instructive than watching the latest bulletins. I suspect the opposite is true, says Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian's chief culture writer

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A Vox article, which explains how you should look at visual art in order to truly appreciate it when you visit a gallery.

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A Vox article, which explains how you should look at visual art in order to truly appreciate it when you visit a gallery.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE “I don’t need the viewer of my paintings to know exactly what I meant, but I would like to have a handshake” What does Molly Ovenden mean by this, and how does it summarize the relationship between artist and viewer?

KEY TERMS Interpret, Central tenet, Interactive, Connect, Cultural artifacts, Perspective, Truthful art, Everyday moments

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Art is for everyone. Here’s how to approach your next trip to a gallery or museum.

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A Discover Magazine article, looking at whether people feel the same emotions when they listen to music. 

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A Discover Magazine article, looking at whether people feel the same emotions when they listen to music. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What are the problems associated with measuring emotions - and can we do so effectively?

Key terms Universal emotional responses, Culture, Acoustic signal, Evidence, Context

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Does Everyone Feel the Same Emotions When Listening to Music?

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Major and minor chords in Western music make us feel a certain way, and research suggest this may be because of an evolutionary trait.

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A Guardian article, reporting Nick Cave’s assertion that music - and art - represents the best of us as humans, so we should never boycott it. 

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A Guardian article, reporting Nick Cave’s assertion that music - and art - represents the best of us as humans, so we should never boycott it. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do you agree that boycotting art because of the actions of the artist eradicates the best of people’s characters?

KEY TERMS Separate, Eradicate

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Nick Cave has said that boycotting songs because of the actions of the artist "is not a very good way to go about things".

The Australian singer-songwriter told the Hay festival: "Making art - especially making music - it prevents you from becoming the worst aspects of your character, and that's why I very much think we need to be very, very careful about the music we don't think people should listen to any more because of what the artist who has made that music may have been like," the Australian singer-songwriter said.

Cave said that it was not necessary, or even possible, to separate songs from the musicians who created them. "We need to understand that the songs themselves are the best of them" and we should not "eradicate the best of these people in order to punish the worst of them".

The rock star does not agree with the way he was recently depicted in the New Statesman as a conservative, following news he would attend the coronation of King Charles. However, he said: "I have these days what I would call a conservative temperament" and is "conservative with a small c".

"I believe that we need to be cautious about the idea of progress. I just see things moving very rapidly and a whole lot of different things worry me a lot, like AI," he said. This caution is informed by his experience of grief and loss, he believes, following the deaths of two of his sons. "I think that I have an understanding of loss and what it is to lose something and how difficult it is to get that back."

While the musician is "not against progress" and thinks "there are huge problems in the world that we really need to deal with" he is critical of "the idea that everything is systemically fucked". The idea that humans beings are corrupt he finds "not only wrong but disturbing and it's becoming a problem".

When asked if he equated that mindset with society's lack of spiritual anchor, he agreed. "I think we got rid of religion, essentially, which may or may not be a good thing, but there's a vacuum that we created that we don't really know what to do with".

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Cave would not call himself a Christian but admitted that he does "act like one". He has met both the current archbishop, Justin Welby, and the former, Rowan Williams. He said that Williams was more interested in talking about poetry than religion, while Welby informed him that he does believe in hell, but doesn't know who's going to go there. "What a chilly individual," Cave remarked.

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Nick Cave speaks out against boycotting songs because of creators' actions

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Australian musician told Hay festival we should not 'eradicate the best of these people in order to punish the worst of them'

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A BBC article, reporting how Jameela Jamil has called out the attendees of the Met Gala (and the general public) because of its controversial theme.

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A BBC article, reporting how Jameela Jamil has called out the attendees of the Met Gala (and the general public) because of its controversial theme.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Can (and should) we separate the art from the artist?

KEY TERMS Controversial, Slippery tactics and double standards, Complicit, Erasure of truth, Protest

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A-listers invited to the glamourous fundraiser in New York were asked to pay homage to the man who, as creative director for Chanel and Fendi, was one of the industry's most prominent and prolific figures.

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Row over Met Gala's tribute to Karl Lagerfeld

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A-listers invited to the glamourous fundraiser in New York were asked to pay homage to the man who, as creative director for Chanel and Fendi, was one of the industry's most prominent and prolific figures.

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An NME article, discussing Nick Cave’s BBC interview, in which he discussed Kanye West, and the old debate about ‘art versus artist’. 

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An NME article, discussing Nick Cave’s BBC interview, in which he discussed Kanye West, and the old debate about ‘art versus artist’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Should the moral integrity of an artist impact the way we evaluate their work?

KEY TERMS Personal choice, Reductive tropes, Inflammatory

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Nick Cave has reiterated his take on the current saga of controversies surrounding Kanye West - that the rapper's antisemitic views are "distasteful" and "disappointing" - but revealed that he still appreciates West as an artist, and doesn't plan to alter his listening habits.

The revelation came in an episode of the BBC's Newsnight program, which Cave appeared on to discuss his recent memoir Faith, Hope And Carnage. The episode will air tonight (November 10) at 10:30pm, however sections of the interview have surfaced online. Cave addresses West's antisemitism in one of them (as published by The Independent), but it's not the first time he's spoken on the topic: last month, during an appearance at the London Literature Festival, he branded West's comments as "deeply disappointing" and "disgraceful".

When asked by a Newsnight journalist to expound on his views towards West and the rapper's recent string of hateful comments, Cave asserted that he "find[s] antisemitism in particular [to be] distasteful", and that "it's been very disappointing to hear [West make] these remarks and such sort of obvious, boring kind of reductive tropes that he's actually pedalling".

The often outspoken singer-songwriter noted, however, that "on some level [he doesn't] care what Kanye has to say on things", declaring: "I do love Kanye, his music."

He added: "It's a personal choice as to whether you can go on and listen to that person's music. I personally can. I love Kanye's music. I feel that he's done the best music of anybody in some time, the most interesting, challenging, bold music."

Cave's latest comments add to those he made last month, when he declared West to be "the greatest artist of our generation". At the time, he cited 2013's 'Yeezus' and West's two Gospel records - 2019's 'Jesus Is King' and 'Jesus Is Born' (the latter of which was a Sunday Service project) - as particular favourites, opining: "Those gospel records are like nothing I've ever heard before."

He also noted that "for some time it might be difficult" to listen to West's music, but that "ultimately", Cave "value[s] the output [of an artist] more" than their personal beliefs. "I know that in time I will be able to get over that and just feel free to be able to listen to Kanye's music again," he said. "That he won't forever be trapped in the worst aspect of his character, and the music that he makes is a journey away from the worst aspect of his character, like all our music is."

Cave is just one of many celebrities that have condemned West for his antisemitism. Among the others are Jack Antonoff, John Legend, Elon Musk, David Schwimmer, KISS' Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, Howard Stern, Eric André, and West's own ex-wife, Kim Kardashian. Additionally, the rapper was dropped from his partnerships with companies like Adidas, Gap and Balenciaga, as well as his bank, record label, lawyer and booking agency.

West himself, though, has remained staunch on his bigoted views. He's continued to spout antisemitic comments on social media and during interviews, including televised appearances on Fox News and NewsNation. Speaking to Piers Morgan (who he labelled "a Karen"), West said he knew his antisemitic comments were racist and that he was "jealous" of Jewish culture.

Last month, it was reported that West filmed an interview for LeBron James' talk show, The Shop, but the episode would not be aired because West made antisemitic comments during it. What did air, though, was an episode of the Drink Champs podcast in which West claimed that Ice Cube influenced his antisemitism ( which Ice Cube has denied) and made false and inflammatory comments on the death of George Floyd.

The interview was later removed from online platforms, and host N.O.R.E. expressed "regret" over his decision to air the interview. In the wake of it, Floyd's family began preparing a defamation lawsuit against West.

West's antisemitism has led to real-world cases of Jewish communities receiving abuse. In September, for example, neo-Nazi groups in Los Angeles hung a banner reading "Kanye is right about the Jews" over a freeway.

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Nick Cave says he'll still listen to Kanye West, who he says has made "the most interesting, challenging, bold music"

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Nick Cave has reiterated his take on the current saga of controversies surrounding Kanye West - that the rapper's antisemitic views are "distasteful" and "disappointing" - but revealed that he still appreciates West as an artist, and doesn't plan to alter his listening habits.

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An Art Newspaper podcast, which considers whether we should judge art via the moral perspective of the artist. 

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An Art Newspaper podcast, which considers whether we should judge art via the moral perspective of the artist. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Students can begin by offering their opinions on this; next ask them to read the article - does this add to their thoughts? Consider also the concept of ‘cancel culture’ - how does this shift the debate (if at all)?

KEY TERMS Cancel culture, Engagement

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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From breaking news and insider insights to exhibitions and events around the world, the team at The Art Newspaper picks apart the art world's big stories with the help of special guests. An award-winning podcast hosted by Ben Luke, The Week in Art is sponsored by Christie's.

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Cancelled: should good artists pay for bad behaviour?

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From breaking news and insider insights to exhibitions and events around the world, the team at The Art Newspaper picks apart the art world's big stories with the help of special guests. An award-winning podcast hosted by Ben Luke, The Week in Art is sponsored by Christie's.

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A New Statesman article that explores the way in which we should relate to art that has been created by figures with (now) questionable moral stances. 

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A New Statesman article that explores the way in which we should relate to art that has been created by figures with (now) questionable moral stances. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do external and internal factors influence our judgement of art and artists? What is the difference between endorsement and portrayal of morally questionable acts - and how should we discern the difference? What is ‘moral immoralism’, and how does it challenge “dubious constraints of conventional morality”?

KEY TERMS External & internal factors, Endorsement vs. portrayal, Moral immoralism.

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A visitor to the Royal Academy of Arts in London looks at a Tracey Emin painting, December 2020. (Photo By: Nicky J Sims/Getty Images)

In recent years, especially in the wake of the MeToo movement, many art lovers have asked themselves what their response to dishonoured artists should be. Some have decided to "cancel" the offending artists - to boycott their work as a punishment for their wrongdoing. In fact, some media companies have literally cancelled their contracts with artists following allegations of misconduct - perhaps to protect their own products from being cancelled.

But these responses are not responses to the artworks themselves. They are motivated by external reasons pertaining to the artist's standing and to financial issues.

Of course, such considerations are not utterly conclusive. One might still have reasons to consume works of morally compromised artists such as Leni Riefenstahl. Watching her Triumph of the Will, for example, may be a reasonable thing to do in order to gain insight into the minds of Hitler's followers for historical purposes or in an effort to comprehend the allure of contemporary fascism.

But here, too, external reasons govern the art lover's response to the tainted artist, and these can be contrasted with what might be called "reasons of art" - reasons that grow out of our transactions with the artwork itself, reasons internal to the experience of the work.

Simply reading The Clansman by the white supremacist Thomas Dixon is probably enough for the morally sensitive reader to dismiss it, since the experience of following the narrative, including rooting for the protagonists, asks us to accept racist ideas.
[see also: Horror and comedy: screaming and laughing]
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Sometimes internal reasons involve moral factors that arise from our very engagement with the works of culpable artists. In such cases, we may wonder whether internal reasons alone could count against our having any contact with blemished goods.

How?

Consider the novel. Novels do not only portray human affairs. Often, they endorse or condemn various ways of being in the world. The novels of the French author Gabriel Matzneff portray paedophilia. But recent revelations about his life indicate irrefutably that his books are also endorsing paedophilia, unlike Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which only portrays it.

The difference between Nabokov and Matzneff suggests that, when an artist is proven guilty of some wrongdoing, that guilt can be considered in relation to the artist's works that invite us to endorse the wrongdoing in question. That is, the morally conscientious art lover may justifiably refuse an author's summons to endorse evil, although, I stress, only in the artist's works that propose such a contract.

I think this approach makes sense. WB Yeats was a proponent of eugenics. But why should that interfere with our appreciation of his poem "The Fiddler of Dooney"? There are no racial politics there. After all, we continue to use some of the statistical techniques of Karl Pearson, despite his commitment to eugenics, because they benefit us. Likewise, despite Yeats's failings regarding race, we can benefit from his creations that don't require us to endorse immoral sentiments. The celebration of joy in "The Fiddler of Dooney" is not compromised by Yeats's dubious biological convictions.

Similarly, Roald Dahl's anti-Semitism does not give us an internal reason to forsake his children's stories which do not traffic in this prejudice. If James and the Giant Peach does not internally prescribe our endorsement of anti-Semitism, why cancel it?

Here, I have connected the known moral misbehaviour of the artist with the moral content of the work and urged that, where there is no connection, the art lover should feel free to savour the work. But why put such weight on the existence of bad behaviour as a clue to the artist's endorsement of evil? Shouldn't the conscientious art lover feel uncomfortable in the face of the mere portrayal of evil?

No, because the mere portrayal of evil does not always signal endorsement.

David Chase, the showrunner of The Sopranos, presented the mafioso Tony Soprano as a harried family man, thereby eliciting positive feelings for him from many viewers. But the show did not endorse Tony's criminal activities. Rather, it unmasked the way in which the excuse - "I did it all to take care of my family" - can serve as a rationalisation for the most heinous transgressions. In doing so, it asked the viewers to reflect upon this rationalisation, perhaps even in their own lives.
[See also: Why we have a moral duty to acknowledge strangers]
Similarly, apparent evil is sometimes lionised for the sake of what might be called "moral immoralism", where the actions in question are designed to challenge the dubious constraints of conventional morality. For example, violations of established sexual mores, as portrayed in DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, may be foregrounded in order to subvert the status quo, so that what appears immoral serves a higher or more moral morality.

For these reasons, and others maybe even more obvious, the simple portrayal of evil cannot be read as an endorsement of evil. Yet when an artist has been found guilty in their daily life of the very crimes and misdemeanours that are exhibited in their work, then it seems reasonable to suspect that we are meant to endorse them - to embrace a positive attitude toward them. And this is something a righteous art lover may resist, even to the point of closing the book and putting it aside.

Of course, this may not be the final word. There may be reasons to open the book again, possibly to gain a better grasp of the corruption involved. Nevertheless, what I have called "reasons of art" can play a legitimate role in deliberating about what is to be done with respect to disgraced artists. And whether we continue to engage with an artist's work may depend on weighing our external reasons against our internal ones.

Noël Carroll is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Centre. He is the author of Art in Three Dimensions and Beyond Aesthetics.

This article is part of the series, a collaboration between the New Statesman and Aaron James Wendland, Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Massey College, Toronto.

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How should we relate to the work of "cancelled" artists?

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In recent years, especially in the wake of the MeToo movement, many art lovers have asked themselves what their response to dishonoured artists should be. Some have decided to â?ocancelâ?? the offending artists â?" to boycott their work as a punishment for their wrongdoing.

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A Guardian article, in which artist Ai Weiwei claims that AI poses no threat to human creativity. 

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A Guardian article, in which artist Ai Weiwei claims that AI poses no threat to human creativity. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do you agree with Ai Weiwei that AI poses no threat to our ability to create art?

KEY TERMS Messages, Metaphorical caves, Inner worlds

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Contemplating the correlation between scientific and technological advancements and human happiness reveals a stark reality, reminiscent of the revelation brought about by a photograph unveiling the moon's surface, extinguishing millennia of humanity's enchanting fantasies. In a parallel vein, today's harsh reality witnesses technology reducing age-old modes of poetic expression and the warmth of art to a somewhat barbaric artifice.

Throughout the development of society, new technological discoveries have shaped the course of humankind. From the primal discovery of fire to the emergence of language for communication, music and dance, each step represented an expression of humanity's desire to communicate and transmit messages. Ancient cave paintings depicting hunting scenes and people in motion, and the mineral-red handprints on mountain cliffs provide glimpses into the thoughts of our ancestors. In their struggles and fights, they found inspiration in the flowing of blood and the beating of their hearts, fostering a renewed understanding of themselves and a heightened passion for life. Despite life's challenges and the formidable forces of nature, humans persists in walking out of their metaphorical caves. The extent of their fantasies surpasses the potent fears in their hearts. Courage and confidence for living stem from the exploration of the inner worlds.

As society progressed, discoveries such as electricity marked the advent of the industrial age, followed by the post-industrial age and the information age. These profound transformations unfolded within a mere couple of centuries. Life in turn has become more comfortable and multifaceted, with reduced vulnerability to natural forces. Yet this comfort is achieved through our reliance on Earth's finite resources, compromising the survival of other species. Despite remarkable technological progress, it appears that humankind has not fundamentally transcended primitive society. Presently, persistent challenges manifest in the form of ongoing and escalating conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. Moreover, the looming spectre of a third world war, once relegated to the realm of imagination, has now become a palpable threat capable of extinguishing humanity. It becomes increasingly apparent that technological advancements alone cannot propel humanity forward. Steam engines and electricity undoubtedly made life more efficient, yet the unchecked greed of capital and foolish acts persist. Enslaving measures on the public increase, evident in the failures of contemporary education and the prioritisation of entertainment over social justice in mass media. This shift has contributed to a society increasingly moving away from spiritual pursuits, embracing a form of refined selfishness and greed that shrouds today's so-called civilisation like a dark cloud.

The rapid development of technology, including the rise of AI, fails to bring genuine wellbeing to humanity; instead, it fosters anxiety and panic. AI, despite all the information it obtains from human experience, lacks the imagination and, most importantly, the human will, with its potential for beauty, creativity, and the possibility of making mistakes.

With the advent of AI, the prevailing belief was that its formidable processing capabilities rendered it capable of accomplishing virtually anything. Indeed, AI has proven adept at replacing numerous tasks involving information collection and processing, a trend accentuated by its increasing strength and expanding scope in response to growing industrial demands. The acquisition of knowledge, skills and modes of thinking that once demanded a human effort of 10 to 20 years can now be expeditiously processed by AI in a seemingly mythical span of seconds. This transformative shift may instigate subversive changes in production, societal structure and productivity. Yet while AI generates outputs characterised by rationality, it inherently lacks the depth of human experience, original ideas and creativity.

Art grapples with issues transcending rationality. Consequently, the advent of AI does not present a challenge to art itself; instead, it challenges the traditional understanding of how humans acquire artistic skills, which posits that art must be cultivated through training to master techniques. Such techniques typically demand an artist's lifelong exploration and dedication, while the driving force behind this exploration is rooted in artists' perennial sense of discontent and an unending aspiration for perfection in their craft. Artists such as Van Gogh or Picasso do not merely repeat themselves but continuously refine their expressions through the lens of their growth, life experiences, beliefs and emotions. Whether capturing a pot of sunflowers, a pair of shoes, or a woman, the simplicity of their subject matter does not diminish the complexity of their artistic endeavours.

Consider Rembrandt, ceaselessly painting his own portrait. What was he seeking? His pursuit was the elusive understanding of a self that remains perpetually unknown. AI lacks the capacity for such introspection. While it can replace certain technological skills, it falters in expressing the nuances of a sunset, a snowstorm, a baby's cry or an old man's tear. Since its inception, this deficiency has marked its existence, with the most significant issue being its lack of human nature and the inherent confidence that human nature carries. True confidence is forged when human weaknesses are comprehended, recognising that everyone is prone to making mistakes. In this paradigm, mistakes serve as the foundation for the perpetual search for truth.

Art, once manipulated as a tool by the powerful to corrupt and subjugate souls in the pursuit of capital, now grapples with relinquishing its millennia-old allure to the relentless march of technology. The traditional technology of painting, along with all human-made realities that affect the retina, now yields to a barrage of technologically generated images, photographs, sculptures, videos, films and visual effects, subverting the longstanding notion that "seeing is believing". This transition births a parallel reality. As figurative thinking merely proliferates an infinite array of falsehoods and fuels an unending epidemic of entertainment, this is a phenomenon warranting both acknowledgment and critique.

The move from ignorance to enlightenment initially laid God to rest, leaving humanity bewildered in the absence of religion. The radiance of the newfound freedom emanating from this void can be perceived as a potent poison, while the associated utopian vision of a democratised society appears as self-ravishing gibberish. Does an increase in knowledge lead to heightened foolishness, a drift further away from enlightenment, and an unchecked descent into degradation?

Do those entrenched in insensitive self-degeneration, resisting salvation, find themselves richer and more comfortable than ever before? Has humanity, expelled from the Garden of Eden, discovered its dwelling place?

Less effort does not lead to greater fulfilment, and the liberation of artistic acts from attainable effort cannot alter the reality of spiritual enslavement.

In this complex landscape, art once again assumes the role of a guardian - safeguarding the inexpressible dignity of life, resisting mental enslavement, dissolving tyranny and countering ideological purges. If freedom exists, it must emanate from resistance.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian and activist. His new exhibition, Ai vs AI is part of CIRCA 20:24 (11 January until 31 March) on Piccadilly Lights, London

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Take in a sunset, a snowstorm or a baby's cry, and see why AI is no threat to art | Ai Weiwei

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Technology is no match for the human will, with all its potential for creativity and the possibility of making mistakes, says artist and activist Ai Weiwei

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A BBC article, exploring the way AI is bringing back to life actors and performers who died long ago. 

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A BBC article, exploring the way AI is bringing back to life actors and performers who died long ago. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE  Who should be in charge of the creative decisions made by actors and performers? Should their rights end after they have died?

KEY TERMS Digital clone, Immortality, Uncomfortable questions, Source material, Deadbots, Rights of the dead

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Most actors dream of building a career that will outlive them. Not many manage it - show business can be a tough place to find success. Those that do, though, can achieve a kind of immortality on the silver screen that allows their names to live on in lights.

One such icon is the American film actor James Dean, who died in 1955 in a car accident after starring in just three films, all of which were highly acclaimed. Yet now, nearly seven decades after he died, Dean has been cast as the star in a new, upcoming movie called Back to Eden.

A digital clone of the actor - created using artificial intelligence technology similar to that used to generate deepfakes - will walk, talk and interact on screen with other actors in the film.

The technology is at the cutting edge of Hollywood computer generated imagery (CGI). But it also lies at the root of some of the concerns being raised by actors and screen writers who have walked out on strike in Hollywood for the first time in 43 years. They fear being replaced by AI algorithms - something they argue will sacrifice creativity for the sake of profit. Actor Susan Sarandon is among those who has spoken about her concerns, warning that AI could make her "say and do things I have no choice about". (R ead about how the 2013 film The Congress predicted Hollywood's current AI crisis.)

Dean's digital resurrection is not the first time deceased actors have seemingly returned to life on screen with the help of advanced digital technology and a sprinkling of Hollywood magic. Carrie Fisher, Harold Ramis and Paul Walker are just a few notable celebrities who reprised iconic film roles posthumously. Brazilian singer Elis Regina was also recently resurrected for a car advert, where she was shown duetting with her daughter Maria Rita. Their screen appearances represent what Travis Cloyd, chief executive of immersive media agency WorldwideXR (WXR), refers to as "passive flat screen, 2D" portrayals, similar to deepfakes.

This is the second time Dean's digital clone has been lined up for a film. In 2019, it was announced he would be resurrected in CGI for a film called Finding Jack, but it was later cancelled. Cloyd confirmed to BBC, however, that Dean will instead star in Back to Eden, a science fiction film in which "an out of this world visit to find truth leads to a journey across America with the legend James Dean".

The digital cloning of Dean also represents a significant shift in what is possible. Not only will his AI avatar be able to play a flat-screen role in Back to Eden and a series of subsequent films, but also to engage with audiences in interactive platforms including augmented reality, virtual reality and gaming. The technology goes far beyond passive digital reconstruction or deepfake technology that overlays one person's face over someone else's body. It raises the prospect of actors - or anyone else for that matter - achieving a kind of immortality that would have been otherwise impossible, with careers that go on long after their lives have ended.

Susan Sarandon on the dangers of AI in film industry

But it also raises some uncomfortable questions. Who owns the rights to someone's face, voice and persona after they die? What control can they have over the direction of their career after death - could an actor who made their name starring in gritty dramas suddenly be made to appear in a goofball comedy or even pornography? What if they could be used for gratuitous brand promotions in adverts?

So why not just let celebrities rest in peace?

Dean's cousin, Marc Winslow, who spent his childhood on an Illinois farmhouse with Dean, who he lovingly calls Jimmy, suspects it's his cousin's undeniable screen appeal that transcends the generations, making him an attractive choice for a leading role in modern cinema. "If there are two or three other people in a scene, your eye goes right to him," he says. "You know, I don't think anyone will ever be able to replace them, but It's possible that they can do that on screen and make it very lifelike."
Digital clones
Dean's image is one of hundreds represented by WRX and its sister licensing company CMG Worldwide - including Amelia Earhart, Bettie Page, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks.

When Dean died 68 years ago, he left behind a robust collection of his likeness in film, photographs and audio - what WRX's Cloyd calls "source material". Cloyd says that to achieve photorealistic representation of a Dean, countless images are scanned, tuned to high resolution and processed by a team of digital experts using advanced technologies. Add in audio, video and AI, and suddenly these materials become the building blocks of a digital clone that looks, sounds, moves and even responds to prompts like Dean.

What Dean did not leave behind is a digital footprint, unlike today's celebrities who engage on social media, take private selfies, send texts and emails, use search engines, shop online for groceries and purchase online medical prescriptions. These activities provide huge amounts of data about how we think and act that could potentially be used to take a digital clone from just a superficial twin to an intelligent one that can convincingly converse with the living.

Carrie Fisher was "resurrected" through the use of CGI for her appearance as Princess Leia in the Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker film (Credit: Alamy)

There are now even companies that allow users to upload deceased loved one's digital data to create " deadbots" that chat with the living from beyond the grave. The more source material, the more accurate and intelligent the deadbot, meaning the executor of a modern-day celebrity's estate could potentially allow for a convincingly realistic clone of the deceased star to continue working in the film industry - and interacting somewhat autonomously - in perpetuity.

Actor Tom Hanks recently predicted that he could well be working well beyond his human lifespan, telling the Adam Buxton Podcast, "I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that's it, but my performances can go on and on and on."
Actors losing jobs to the dead
Hanks' comment hints at a very real concern for actors who fear that the next phase of digital human resurrection presents troubling ethical, legal and practical issues for both celebrities and everyday citizens. Voice actors, in particular, have been leading the conversation and working across acting guilds to form a unified front in protecting the rights and careers of actors.
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"For the voices of Mickey Mouse, Porky Pig, Snow White - every time a voice passes away, a new actor gets hired to play that voice," says Tim Friedlander, president and founder of the National Association of Voice Actors (Nava) in the US. "But what if you could use Mel Blanc [the voice actor who breathed life into many of the Loony Tunes cartoon characters] forever?"

Friedlander and his voice actor colleagues fear that this situation is imminent, and that digitally resurrected voice actors will monopolise the voiceover industry, eliminating jobs for living actors. "There's no opportunity for anybody else living because now they've lost their job to a deceased voice actor because he's the original voice of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and other [Looney Tunes characters]."

Cloyd acknowledges the potential for fewer acting opportunities but offers a "glass-half-full" perspective toward employing dead actors. "At the end of the day, it creates lots of jobs," he says, referring to the other technical and film industry jobs the technology could generate. "So even though it could be jeopardising one person's role or job, at the same time, it's creating hundreds of jobs in regards to what it takes to do this at a high level."
The rights of the dead
If the dead - or rather, their digital clones - are damned to an eternity of work, who benefits financially? And do the dead have any rights?

Simply put, the rules are murky and, in some regions of the world, non-existent.

Attorney Erik Kahn, who co-authored an article about the post mortem publicity rights of celebrities for the American Bar Association's magazine Landslide, says that each state in the US has a different situation. Some states have no clear publicity rights to protect dead celebrities' wishes at all.

In general, when a celebrity dies, "rights to publicity" pass on from the celebrity to next of kin, or to the party granted these rights in a will. But Kahn says even a will, which will usually dictate who will benefit financially from the commercial use of the dead celebrity's image and likeness, holds limited legal weight since "it's not like a contract because it's a one-way document". The power for how that person's image is used passes to their living executor. A few celebrities, such as Robin Williams, were able to use a will to limit the use of their likeness after death, but that limit expires after 25 years.

But celebrities do benefit from an added layer of protection from certain types of defamation, says Kahn. Marilyn Monroe, for example, could not be employed posthumously in a pornographic film if her estate did not approve the use of her image and likeness. Depending on the state, Monroe's estate might argue that copyrights have been infringed upon, that she has been defamed by false statements that do not reflect her true reputation, and that portraying her in a damaging light could "interfere with prospective business advantage". Additionally, the federal Lanham Act serves as an additional buffer that protects deceased celebrities from being used in false or misleading advertising, and from trademark infringement.

With huge amounts of "source material" available for modern celebrities there is a greater chance their careers will continue after death thanks to AI (Credit: Getty Images)

New York boasts the most comprehensive definition of "right of publicity" that protects deceased individuals against commercial exploitation or unauthorised use of their personal characteristics. But even in states with seemingly strict regulations in place, right of publicity really protects the estate of the deceased, not necessarily the dead person.

"If your family wants to sell you out and you're dead, there's not a whole lot you can do," says New York-based attorney Pou-I "Bonnie" Lee, who co-authored the Landslide legal article with Kahn. What this means is that Marilyn Monroe, for example, could appear in a pornographic film posthumously - legally - if her estate were to consent to the use of her image and likeness in this manner. "If the estate is saying they want this, it's unfortunate, but I think it could happen," says Lee.
Personal use and private individuals
While dead celebrities do have some vague protections in specific jurisdictions when it comes to commercial exploitation of their image and likeness, average citizens may have far less control over how their likeness and digital legacy are used postmortem. In the US, there's little legislation protecting the dead from being digitally resurrected for personal use. When you die, just about anyone can upload your public digital legacy into AI software to create a deadbot or an interactive AI avatar. States with more expansive postmortem protections, such as New York, do prohibit the use of individuals' identities for certain nefarious purposes, but Lee is sceptical of how these protections are enacted. "Ultimately someone needs to enforce it," she says.

Cloyd, Friedlander and Kahn all agree that there needs to be legislation put in place sooner rather than later to protect the rights and legacies of the dead - both celebrities and otherwise. Technology is advancing at a rapid pace, and ethical debates around digital representations of the dead are already cropping up. Cloyd admits to initially being "a little worried" about how the dead are being digitally revived but says he's confident that WXR is being proactive and sensitive in dealing with these issues.

Friedlander, too, is actively advocating for legislation that protects voice actors from losing work, and he hopes that Nava's work will help actors' associations around the world to organise and advocate for fair opportunities.

As for Winslow, he admits to having mixed feelings about seeing his cousin digitally resurrected. "I don't know what to think about it," he says. "I want him to be respected. He was really involved in acting, took it very serious. I would want the same image to be projected."

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How AI is bringing film stars back from the dead

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Celebrities such as James Dean can be brought back to life thanks to artificial intelligence, but it is raising troubling questions about what rights any of us have after we die.

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A Conversation article and video, exploring how the rap sub-genre of dip hop is changing what it means for music to be heard. 

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A Conversation article and video, exploring how the rap sub-genre of dip hop is changing what it means for music to be heard. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE “Subverting preconceived notions” is the way in which the arts progress. Do you agree? Justify your answer with reference to the article.

KEY TERMS Sign language, Dip hop, Cultural impact, Cultural norms, Breaking the mold, Preconceived notions

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In April 2023, DJ Supalee hosted Supafest Reunion 2023 to celebrate entertainers and promoters within the U.S. Deaf community.

The event included performances by R&B artist and rapper Sho'Roc, female rapper Beautiful The Artist, the group Sunshine 2.0, DJs Key-Yo and Hear No Evil, as well as ASL performer and former rapper Polar Bear, who now goes by Red Menace.

Many of these artists, activists and entrepreneurs have contributed to an ever-growing hip-hop scene within the Deaf community, which includes a subgenre of rap known as dip hop.

As hip-hop reaches its 50th anniversary, five decades of its cultural impact reverberates in mainstream and underground settings. What originated in the Bronx can now be found all over the world, taking on new forms as it has evolved in a diversity of spaces and places, from trap music and horrorcore to spaza, a subgenre that emerged in Cape Town, South Africa.

Dip hop is one of many styles of rap that have developed over the years. But it stands apart from other subgenres of hip-hop because rappers lay down rhymes in sign languages and craft music informed by their cultural experiences within the Deaf community.

The birth of a musical movement

As an ethnomusicologist, I've followed the development of dip hop since 2011, documenting how rappers have pioneered this art form while introducing outsiders, like myself, to Deaf culture.

In 2005, the rapper Warren " Wawa" Snipe came up with the term "DIP HOP" in ASL and English to classify a developing style of rap music within the Deaf community.

While artists of this style identify their music in different ways - some use labels like "deaf rap," "deaf hip-hop" and "sign rap" - the designation "dip hop" goes beyond adding a qualifier to the broader musical genre of rap. Instead, it signals an independent style grounded in both hip-hop and Deaf culture. Like bounce, trap and drill, the label "dip hop" makes a greater distinction from being a variation of rap to a style that is heavily situated within Deaf culture and determined by Deaf aesthetics.

In many ways, dip hop has followed a trajectory not unlike hip-hop.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Deaf DJs and entertainment entrepreneurs organized DIY parties, nightlife events and social gatherings. These venues provided opportunities for rappers, DJs, dancers and other artists to begin to develop and explore their own style of hip-hop and connect with other rappers and DJs.

Cities with Deaf schools served as cultural hubs for musical networking. Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, New York, have acted as significant sites of production within the U.S. by connecting deaf and hard of hearing students from all over the world.

Additionally, greater access to recording technology, video streaming sites and social media have given Deaf artists tools to create music and connect with other artists and fans.

The many forms of dip hop

While the incorporation of sign language is a fundamental element of dip hop - and remains at the forefront of defining this style - dip hop extends far beyond crafting original rap songs in sign language.

It involves musical expression that's shaped through a Deaf cultural lens - songs that reorient mainstream notions of what can be considered music. At the same time, every artist has their own rapping style, with dip hop performances taking on a range of different forms and structures.

For example, some dip hop artists work with both oral and manual languages to make their music accessible to hearing people. There are those who perform in both languages simultaneously, and others who prerecord their vocal track, which plays in the background as they rap in sign language.

Some artists collaborate with interpreters. In " Vergiss mich nicht," artist Deaf Kat Night raps in German sign language, while the lyrics are interpreted orally in German.

Then there are those who collaborate with hearing or deaf DJs. " Breaking Barrels," featuring DefStar, is just one of the many collaborations between Wawa and DJ Nicar.

Performances can also involve musical instruments. Sean Forbes, for example, performs with a live band while also rapping in ASL and English, an approach seen in his music video " Calm Like a Bomb."

Alternatively, there are rappers who create music for Deaf audiences and solely rap in sign languages. These songs, however, may still have auditory components, which often consist of artists composing their own beats or raising the volume of previously recorded songs to rap over.

Dip hop, like many styles of music, comes to life through live performance. Artists move across the stage with their hands flying through the air as audiences pulse to the rhythm of the blasting bass beat.

Some artists further immerse their audiences in the musical experience by using specialized instruments and equipment such as subwoofers, objects that can conduct vibrations like balloons, or new forms of haptic technology, which refers to wearables, such as vests, that channel sound vibrations.

Some artists also incorporate visuals into their performances through the use of video screens and sound-activated lights.

Breaking into the mainstream

Dip hop artists have struggled to be acknowledged as musicians in their own right - to have their artistry be the focus of attention, rather than the fact that they're deaf or hard of hearing.

That's starting to change.

In 2009, Finnish rapper Marko " Signmark" Vuoriheimo signed a record deal with Warner Music Finland and released " Smells Like Victory" and " Speakerbox " that same year.

This marked the first time in history a Deaf artist was signed to a major record label. The following year, Detroit-based rapper and National Technical Institute for the Deaf alumnus Sean Forbes signed a contract with WEB Entertainment and released the single " I'm Deaf," attracting mainstream attention to this style of rap.

And through the support of the Deaf community, hearing allies and fans, Forbes' EP " Little Victories " reached No. 1 in the hip-hop category on iTunes and made it to the top 200 Billboard chart in 2020.

The following year, Wawa's single " LOUD" was a top 20 dance track on iTunes. In 2022, Forbes and Wawa made history again as the first ASL performers at a Super Bowl halftime show.

In " Sign of the Times," Wawa raps:

 Sup beautiful people I'm the Godpop of dip hop Deaf eyes through hip hop With signs for your eyes Blow your mind and it won't stop.

As dip hop evolves, it continues to push the boundaries of convention. In the spirit of hip-hop, dip hop rebels both musically and socially against cultural norms, breaking the mold and expanding possibilities for musical artistry.

Through their performances, dip hop artists not only subvert preconceived notions of music but also of Deaf culture and deafness, changing what it means for music to be heard.

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Deaf rappers who lay down rhymes in sign languages are changing what it means for music to be heard

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Dip hop artists move across the stage, hands flying through the air, as audiences pulse to the rhythm of a blasting bass beat.

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A Guardian article, looking at how a new exhibition in Paris presents works of art by Picasso very differently, to attract a newer, wider audience. 

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A Guardian article, looking at how a new exhibition in Paris presents works of art by Picasso very differently, to attract a newer, wider audience. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do students agree that in order to evolve with the times, art exhibitions need to leave the ‘white box’? What does this reveal about our developing relationship with art?

Key terms Reinvented, Controversy, Feminism, Colonialism and race, Relevant

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Vintage floral wallpaper, wonky flyposters, green astroturf and brown kraft paper are not the usual backdrop for Pablo Picasso masterpieces.

But Paris's Picasso museum has radically reinvented its rooms to win back a younger generation that is shying away from the influential Spanish artist over controversy about his alleged cruel treatment of women and his use of African artefacts.

A spectacularly colourful and playful rehang of a series of Picasso masterworks, paintings, sketches and ceramics opens this week, featuring major pieces by contemporary painters, including key Black female artists, in order to open up the debate on feminism, colonialism and race, and bring in young audiences for the 50th anniversary of the artist's death.

One of the works that forms part of the exhibition by Chéri Samba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photograph: Florian Kleinefenn/Courtesy Galerie Magnin-A

As museums across the world from New York to Málaga and Bucharest prepare 50th anniversary exhibitions this year, the Paris Picasso museum chose not to flinch at controversy surrounding the artist, whose troubled private life - namely his allegedly callous treatment of his wives, lovers and muses - has become more of a focus for young audiences than his work since the #MeToo movement. There is also renewed debate over western artists' use of African artefacts, which Picasso collected.

"We wanted to open up the museum, reach a wider audience and bring in all those debates: on women, post-colonial issues and politics," said the museum's president, Cécile Debray. "Bringing in new and contemporary artists shows that we're open to all the debates on Picasso. We put these questions on the table and discuss them without claiming to have all the answers. We wanted to make Picasso relevant."

One room, entitled Imaginary Journeys, explores Picasso's personal collection of African objects, and how such pieces were appropriated by the avant-garde artists of the early 20th century. Hanging alongside is the Nigerian artist Obi Okigbo's triptych, Landscapes of My Childhood Remembered, which examines ancestral stories and ritual, echoing the loss and trauma after the Biafran war.

Obi Okigbo's triptych, Landscapes of My Childhood Remembered. Photograph: Vinciane Lebrun/Voyez-Vous

A darkened room, In Times of War, looks at Picasso's work during the second world war alongside a piece by the US artist Mickalene Thomas, from her Resist series examining the civil rights demonstrations and the Black Lives Matter movement. Thomas said Picasso's masterpiece Guernica, on the horrors of Spanish civil war, dealt with many of the themes that she did. "These themes of the mother with dying child, the war, death and pain" could be likened to "the familiar histories of what Black and brown people, especially mothers, face today", she said.

Elsewhere, works by the artist Dora Maar, who was a major surrealist photographer as well as Picasso's partner and muse, and the French artist Louise Bourgeois, reflect Picasso's treatment of the human form.

Crucially, the show comes as the museum also hosts France's first major exhibition by Faith Ringgold, the Black feminist American artist whose work includes rereadings of Picasso and the Paris art scene of the early 20th century.

The museum's controversial move to give a "free-hand" to the British fashion designer Paul Smith to use "colour and kitsch" to redesign its rooms and rip down the standard formal white backdrop to Picasso's work might once have been written off as yet another gimmicky partnership of high fashion and the art world.

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One of the backdrops to Picasso works designed by Paul Smith. Photograph: Voyez-Vous/Museé National Picasso

But curators have welcomed the museum team's painstaking effort to present and explain Picasso chronologically alongside other modern artists against Smith's incongruous backdrops. It could spark a permanent rethink of how the museum, housed in a 17th-century mansion, hangs Picasso's work in the future.

The museum's unique collection of more than 5,000 works and 200,000 items from the artist's studio and personal collection was given to the French state by his family in lieu of inheritance tax, and there is a constant pressure to find new ways to present them.

Smith admitted he had felt quite frightened of reinventing the rooms because he had little academic knowledge of the modern master and feared being accused of seeming disrespectful. But his jokey designs were seen as teasing out new views of the artist. One room hung with striped Breton sailor tops echos Robert Doisneau's photographs of the artist at home in the south of France. Alongside, hangs a work by Chéri Samba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that uses the striped top as a symbol of western artists' views of the African work which inspired cubism.

Another of Smith's backdrops is deliberately badly papered with 1960s flyposters of Picasso's exhibitions.

Smith said the typical modernist "white box" in which museums show modern art had its limitations, so he had done the opposite. "The white box, for today's generation that is quite intimidating really," he said. "For the world of pop we are in now, everything is very immediate on people's phones, so it's intentionally a very visual exhibition."

The Collection in a New Light runs until 27 August at the Musée Picasso, Paris. Faith Ringgold Black is Beautiful runs until 2 July

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Paris Picasso museum reinvents itself to tackle artist's troubled legacy

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Vintage floral wallpaper, wonky flyposters, green astroturf and brown kraft paper are not the usual backdrop for Pablo Picasso masterpieces. But Paris's Picasso museum has radically reinvented its rooms to win back a younger generation that is shying away from the influential Spanish artist over controversy about his alleged cruel treatment of women and his use of African artefacts.

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An FT article, arguing that art can help us overcome division and conflict by helping us to focus on what we all have in common.

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An FT article, arguing that art can help us overcome division and conflict by helping us to focus on what we all have in common.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How can art give us “a sense of our shared humanity”, and is this its most important purpose?

KEY TERMS  Emotional respite, Cultural differences vs. shared humanity, Fellow human beings, Dualistic thinking, Common ground

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

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Let's pause for breath and consider our shared humanity

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In our age of division and conflict, it requires reflection to focus on all that we have in common. That's where art can help

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A long and suitably poetic FT essay by Simon Schama, which discusses how writers and artists have led the way in the fight for human rights. 

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A long and suitably poetic FT essay by Simon Schama, which discusses how writers and artists have led the way in the fight for human rights. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do you agree that “a poem, a novel, a painting or a song” has more power to bring about change than “databanks or algorithms”? Can the arts help resolve the battle “between truth and lies”?

KEY TERMS Culture wars, Soft power, Battle between lies and truth, Visionary imagination

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What is included in my trial?

During your trial you will have complete digital access to FT.com with everything in both of our Standard Digital and Premium Digital packages.

Standard Digital includes access to a wealth of global news, analysis and expert opinion. Premium Digital includes access to our premier business column, Lex, as well as 15 curated newsletters covering key business themes with original, in-depth reporting. For a full comparison of Standard and Premium Digital, click here.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the "Settings & Account" section.

What happens at the end of my trial?

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for $69 per month.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the "Settings & Account" section. If you'd like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user's needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel.

When can I cancel?

You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.

You can still enjoy your subscription until the end of your current billing period.

What forms of payment can I use?

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During your trial you will have complete digital access to FT.com with everything in both of our Standard Digital and Premium Digital packages. Standard Digital includes access to a wealth of global news, analysis and expert opinion. Premium Digital includes access to our premier business column, Lex, as well as 15 curated newsletters covering key business themes with original, in-depth reporting.

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An Arts Newspaper article, investigating the story of a Russian artist who faces prison after she made a protest in a grocery story. 

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An Arts Newspaper article, investigating the story of a Russian artist who faces prison after she made a protest in a grocery story. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does this article help us to understand the relationship between the arts and ethics?

KEY TERMS Protest, False information

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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An artist in St Petersburg faces up to ten years in prison for an anti-war protest in which she replaced supermarket shelf price labels with short news texts about the bombing of an art school and drama theatre in Mariupol, the besieged Ukrainian port city.

Judge Yelena Leonova, ruled that Sasha Skochilenko, 32, must be held in pre-trial detention until 31 May. She was arrested after a supermarket customer reported the labels to the police. Perekryostok was caught on security camera footage and questioned late into the night of 11 April according to her lawyer, who was quoted by independent news sources.

According to PaperPaper, a St Petersburg news site for which Skochilenko used to work and which has, like most independent news sources, been blocked in Russia, the judge said that Skochilenko is "accused of carrying out serious actions against public safety", and that "acting deliberately, she installed fragments of paper containing knowingly false information." The fact that she "has friends in Ukraine" and "a sister in France" are grounds to keep her in prison rather than under house arrest.

It is a crime to describe Russia's 24 February invasion of Ukraine as a war, according to a new law that took effect on 4 March.

Sasha Skochilenko replaced price tags with information on the war in Ukraine Image: Sever.Realii

In a social media post that has since been locked, Skochilenko wrote on 2 March that "peace postcards" left on store shelves are a way of reaching the public. The post and postcards that she created are published on Sever.Realii, a news site of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

"After all, there are still a lot of people who do not know (do not remember?) about what a miracle human life is, how beautiful and precious it is, and that violence is not a solution to problems," she wrote.

Yesterday in Moscow, in a further sign of how far authorities will go to block positive mentions of Ukraine, a concert which featured music by Valentin Silvestrov-Ukraine's most famous living composer-was raided by police. Silvestrov, 84, had to flee Kyiv in March and is now a refugee in Berlin.

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St Petersburg artist faces prison after anti-war protest in grocery store

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An artist in St Petersburg faces up to ten years in prison for an anti-war protest in which she replaced supermarket shelf price labels with short news texts about the bombing of an art school and drama theatre in Mariupol, the besieged Ukrainian port city.

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A National article, looking at two works of art by Banksy based on the killing of George Floyd. 

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A National article, looking at two works of art by Banksy based on the killing of George Floyd. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does art help us to explore moral issues?

KEY TERMS Politically-charged.

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Mysterious street artist Banksy has shared a new piece of art on his Instagram page, along with a statement seemingly inspired by by the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests taking place globally.

The image shows portrait of a black figure with roses and a candle, in a funeral set-up. As you swipe though, you see that the candle is setting the US flag alight.

The third image in the series of photos is a statement from the famously outspoken artist.

"At first I thought I should just shut up and listen to black people about this issue. But why would I do that? It's not their problem. It's mine," he wrote.

"People of colour are being failed by the system. The white system. Like a broken pipe flooding the apartment of the people living downstairs. This faulty system is making their life a misery, but it's not their job to fix it. They can't - no-one will let them in the apartment upstairs.

"This is a white problem and if white people don't fix it, someone will have to come upstairs and kick the door in."

Following the death of Floyd, an unarmed black man, who was killed in police custody after a white policeman knelt on his neck, rallies and protests have broken out in cities across the US and around the world.

This latest piece is a departure from Banksy's large-scale stencilled street art he is known for. He has not yet announced where, or if, the piece will be displayed.

Little is officially known about Banksy, who makes an effort to keep his identity hidden, revealing little about his personal life. However, he is never one to shy away from social commentary.

In May, a work was unveiled at a UK hospital, depicting a young boy putting his Spider-Man and Batman toys in the bin, instead choosing to play with a doll of a nurse, making her the new superhero.

A month earlier, he seemed to give the world an insight into his set-up as he too was working from home, with a bathroom covered in his trademark stencilled rats. The artist joked: "My wife hates it when I work from home."

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Banksy shares new artwork on Instagram inspired by George Floyd's death

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Mysterious street artist Banksy has shared a new piece of art on his Instagram page, along with a statement seemingly inspired by by the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests taking place globally. The image shows portrait of a black figure with roses and a candle, in a funeral set-up.

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A Guardian article, looking at the statue that was put up to replace the one of a slave trader that was knocked down during a Black Lives matter protest in Bristol, UK. 

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A Guardian article, looking at the statue that was put up to replace the one of a slave trader that was knocked down during a Black Lives matter protest in Bristol, UK. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Ask students to consider Marc Quinn’s replacement for the statue of Edward Colston - what emotions does it inspire? What message is it sending? Then focus on that quote by Jürgen Habermas: is art’s purpose to “robustly interrogate” institutions and nations? Is art ‘real’ art without confronting moral issues? Does art always have to advocate change? Also check out Quinn’s Odyssey work.

KEY TERMS Call for action, Activism

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here's a lookout stationed at the end of Colston Street and a load of people, some dressed in hi-vis vests, are gathering at a nearby restaurant. Then, in the dawn light, a statue concealed in plastic wrapping can be seen approaching on a hiab truck. It turns the corner and reverses towards the plinth where the statue of Edward Colston once stood. There's a sense of mischief in the air on this bright clear morning in Bristol - and revolution.

The team spring into action and, minutes later, a new statue has been placed on the spot where Colston's stood and swiftly unwrapped. It's of a young black woman, her fist raised in a black power salute. "There's a new woman in power!" a cyclist shouts as he turns the bend. On Twitter, responses start coming in fast. Dr Lola Solebo writes: "Am waking my girls up early so I can show them this. What a thing of beauty. What a thing to wake up to."

Another woman is standing by the plinth. "I feel full of pride, so, so full of pride," she says, looking up at the sculpture. It's of her.

Rewind a few weeks and this same woman is knocking at the door of an artist's studio, dressed in a face mask. She's hurried in and asked to stand on a podium, with her legs slightly apart and her fist in the air. She's re-enacting the black power salute she made on the plinth of Edward Colston's statue on 7 June, just after protesters pulled the slave-trader's likeness down. A hi-tech, 3D scanning machine whirrs into life, its 201 cameras capturing her defiant pose, and every thread of her clothes, which are the same ones she wore on that tumultuous Sunday.

The woman's name is Jen Reid and this scene was taking place in the studio of artist Marc Quinn. And now today, Reid stands once again on that plinth, but rendered in black resin - Quinn's own guerrilla-style response to the much debated question of what should replace the statue, which ended up in the waters of Bristol harbour.

A triumphant call for action ... Jen Reid standing on the Colston plinth in Bristol, just after the statue was toppled. Photograph: @bricks_magazine/instagram

It's an extraordinarily powerful sight, the early morning light reflecting on the smooth, ebony surface of the statue, which has just been placed on the plinth. The sense of triumph in the air finds a perfect echo in Reid's pose. That fist, balled up and thrown into the air, exerting energy into the heavens and casting the psychological pressure of systemic racism into the ether, calling for action and for others to stand with her, with us. From the coils of her afro to the wrinkles in her skin as she clenches her fist, the emotion is potent and palpable.

It all began with a post on Instagram by @biggiesnug, showing Reid on the plinth with the caption: "My wife. My life. She matters." The post was soon liked by @marcquinnart, Quinn's Instagram account and, after a lot of organising, this powerful moment was recreated in his studio: first 3D-printed in sections, then cast in resin, before being meticulously put together by Quinn's team of craftsmen. "Posing for the sculpture," says Reid, "brought back all the memories of getting on the plinth. The feelings and emotions. I felt powerful."

The toppling of Colston's statue gave the Black Lives Matter movement a moment of symbolism that will reverberate for years. As George Floyd's last words - "I can't breathe" - ricocheted around the world, Bristol protesters took to the streets with a newfound energy. Two protesters leapt up with a length of rope, others pulled and soon Colston, who had glared down at the city since 1895, was gone. Reid's stand instantly felt as if it should be part of our visual lexicon, a vital piece of the history lesson about slavery long overdue in Britain. Quinn agrees.

'I feel full of pride' ... Jen Reid poses in front of her black resin and steel statue. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

"Racism," the artist says, "is a huge problem, a virus that needs to be addressed. I hope this sculpture will continue that dialogue, keep it in the forefront of people's minds, be an energy conductor. The image created by Jen that day - when she stood on the plinth with all the hope of the future of the world flowing through her - made the possibility of greater change feel more real than it has before."

Quinn, who has called his work A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020, continues: "When I saw the picture of Jen on Instagram, I immediately thought it would be great to immortalise that moment. The image is a silhouette: she looked like a sculpture already. I've been making portraits of refugees using 3D scanning over the last year and applied the same technology to this."

The Instagram image shows Reid's outline against the grey Bristol sky, with cardboard signs scattered around the plinth, which has been covered in graffiti. One sign reads: "He who accepts evil without protesting against it is co-operating with it." Perhaps this message touched Quinn? As a celebrated white male artist, he could be criticised for inserting himself into the debate. He recalls a quote from Desmond Tutu: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." The artist adds: "White people in positions of power need to speak up and support change in the way black people are treated, their positions in society. I have been listening and learning and one of the phrases that really struck me was, 'White silence is violence.'"

'This reaches everyone' ... Quinn's fourth plinth statue Alison Lapper Pregnant in 2004. Photograph: Dan Regan/Getty Images

Quinn is no newcomer to plinths. In 2004, he became the first artist to be commissioned for the fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square, placing Alison Lapper Pregnant on the vacant site, a statue of the artist who was born without arms and with shortened legs. "The sculpture contributed to moving the narrative around disability forward in the UK," Quinn says. "The great thing about the public realm is that it is very democratic and accessible. Museums can be very elite spaces. This reaches everyone."

On the subject of whether white artists should write these stories, Reid says: "I wanted to do this with Marc Quinn as he's always cared about pushing inclusion to the forefront and making people think. It's not about black or white. If people want to stand by me, that's great."

The statue of Colston was created by a white man, John Cassidy, to commemorate a white slave-trader. Now the plinth is occupied by the work of a white artist who feels duty bound to correct the situation, to amplify voices that have been silenced for so long. It's reminiscent of US film-maker Bree Newsome 's athletic act of protest. In 2015, Newsome scaled a flagpole to remove the Confederate flag hanging in the South Carolina state house grounds. She told the Washington Post: "We needed somebody who could help me over the fence. Be a lookout. We decided it should be a white man ... because we wanted to communicate it's not just the role of the people who are oppressed, but it's also on the people who have benefited from oppression who have to be part of the process."

'White people in positions of power need to speak up' ... Marc Quinn. Photograph: Marc Quinn studio

Many have described finding the Colston statue an affront to the black citizens of Bristol. "Having to see that statue daily does something to you," says Reid. "Knowing what Colston represented, I felt compelled to take a stand and raise my fist in empowerment for the slaves who died at his hands. It was like an electrical surge of power was running through me as I took the plinth in memory of George Floyd, and for every black person killed by police for being black, and those who face injustice daily based on the colour of their skin."

She pauses and adds: "To those who are listening, keep talking, keep righting wrongs when you see them. Keep educating those that want to listen. Unlike Black History Month, I hope this statue addresses blackness every day."

The question of removing the Colston statue was not a new one. Petitions had been signed, meetings had been held. The artist Hew Locke, in his 2006 series Restoration, introduced his own response. In a photographic work called Colston, Locke covered the statue in trinkets, beads and cowrie shells, which were used as currency to trade slaves.

In terms of getting Quinn's sculpture on to the plinth, the project took on a Mission Impossible feel. NDAs were signed, late-night rendezvous arranged. Quinn has not received permission to put the sculpture up, but he is also not breaking any laws. His team transported the artwork from the workshop on a truck with a built-in crane to lift it up on to the plinth. The bottom of the sculpture is designed to sit securely without drilling, gluing or damage to the plinth. In many ways, proceeding without permission makes this a special sort of art anarchism, entering the realm of activism.

How will people react? How will the police react? Quinn says a big motivation for the project is to spark debate, keep the attention on this vital issue, and see how everyone reacts. "I guess that includes the authorities, too," he says.

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote about how institutions and nations suffer an erosion of legitimacy over time if they do not robustly interrogate themselves. Perhaps statues should be part of this interrogation. Monuments, after all, are symbols of the systems we live in. Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020 is like a modern Statue of Liberty. Indeed, Lady Liberty was originally designed to celebrate freed slaves.

In the US, statues continue to fall. This replacement by Quinn and Reid should hopefully catalyse a call for action, for a new world, for a new sculptural legacy. Today, as Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020 stands on its plinth, the Colston statue sits on a concrete floor in a wooden container locked up by the council, covered in scratches from where it was dragged across the asphalt, hands and face spray-painted red for blood. That's karma for you.

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'Hope flows through her': artist Marc Quinn on replacing Colston with a Black Lives Matter statue

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The sculptor has placed a statue of a woman doing a black power salute on the vacant plinth in Bristol. Our writer, who was at the dawn unveiling, tells the full story of its creation - and speaks to Jen Reid, the protester whose gesture inspired him

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A Widewalls article, presenting a range of artworks that help us to remember and commemorate the events of November 11th, 2001. 

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A Widewalls article, presenting a range of artworks that help us to remember and commemorate the events of November 11th, 2001. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is the key role of art to help us establish ‘emotional control’ over situations? Is the prerequisite of art to tackle moral issues? Students can also read this BBC article, examining the conspiracy theories that arose very quickly afterwards; explore the event via archaeology here; consider how different versions of the same image can lead to different impressions here, and think about why we have a need to make movies of traumatic incidents here.

KEY TERMS Healing object, Memories, Power

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9/11 Art Pieces in Remembrance of September 11th 2001 | Widewalls

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In honor of the anniversary of the terrorist attack on the USA, we have compiled a selection of 9/11 art pieces inspired by these tragic events.

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A Guardian article, looking at a Christmas-themed work of art by Banksy. 

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A Guardian article, looking at a Christmas-themed work of art by Banksy. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE In order of levels of sophistication, first, use this story to consider what makes it so good (think about the concept and the execution of the art). Second, how effectively is art able to explore ethical issues (perhaps in a way that other forms of expression aren’t able to do)? Finally think about how might their political and social agenda shape the way they assess this work of art?

KEY TERMS Representing themselves, Interactive

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Have a Banksy Christmas: his Birmingham reindeer are an artistic miracle

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Rather than exploit ‘the homeless’, this painting empowers rough sleepers to draw attention to their individuality

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A Guardian article, which considers whether the purpose of the Oscars - and the movie industry - is art, activism, or possibly both. 

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A Guardian article, which considers whether the purpose of the Oscars - and the movie industry - is art, activism, or possibly both. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is art just an aesthetic experience for those involved, or does it have to be about changing and challenging the world? Is film any different from other art forms in this respect? Do filmmakers and artists have an obligation to approach their work in an ‘ethical’ way?

KEY TERMS Art vs. activism, Political engagement

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hat is the point of cinema? For most people: entertainment; for some: art. And for a few: a means of shaping attitudes. Such purposes are not mutually exclusive - just ask Ken Loach (or even, perhaps, the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl).

Proudly political engagement isn't new. The movies fought the cold war, decried Vietnam and took sides on many grand issues of the past.

What is new is an increasing onus on films - awards films in particular - to clearly flag their ideological allegiances. And, after being scolded for dragging its feet, the industry is eagerly complying. Minorities' stories are being told and their causes championed; diversity is gathering pace on screen and behind the camera.

Of course, worthy purpose can invigorate. Artistic achievement can be galvanised by having something important to say. Nonetheless, advancing a message is different from pursuing excellence. These objectives won't necessarily be aligned.

Why should they? After all, trying to engineer a better society should clearly trump mere aesthetics. Cinema's leading lights can seem to prioritise the progressive cause above all else, to judge by their pronouncements; however, many filmgoers have yet to see the light. In the service of righteousness, the big screen risks leaving its enthusiasts behind. Whether this will happen remains to be seen, but perhaps Sunday's verdicts will give us a hint of what is to come.

The claim of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to represent industry thinking is often derided. Oscars voters have long been disproportionately pale, male and stale and their selections have frequently been mocked. Now, though, steps have been taken to diversify the membership: female and ethnic minority participation has doubled in the past few years.

Anthony Hopkins in The Father. Photograph: Film4/Allstar

Hollywood's share of global cinema may be small and shrinking: its major studios have delivered only one of the eight nominees for best picture. Yet, for now, Hollywood's historic contest retains its glittering crown. This year's ceremony may be the least watched for decades, but its decisions will still be telling. The field from which its choices will be made provides not just cinematic quality, but also an impressive reflection of current social concerns.

It is only six years since the #OscarsSoWhite uproar. Now, however, of 20 acting nominees, nine are people of colour; most of the candidates for best actor are not white. Two women have been recognised in the best director category for the first time.

The best picture list boasts a feminist parable in the shape of Promising Young Woman, a Black rallying cry in Judas and the Black Messiah, a salute to immigrants in Minari, a story of minority ethnic disability in Sound of Metal and an anti-establishment carnival in The Trial of the Chicago 7. Ranged against these are Mank - which, as a clever-clever feast of Hollywood self-love, might have been the favourite in days of yore - and The Father, an all-white, male-dominated exercise in value-free virtuosity.

Yet the bookies' frontrunner by a long way is none of the above. It is Nomadland, the almost-documentary about life among the RV-homed, itinerant underclass who wander between the US's trailer camps. Its director, Chloé Zhao, is Asian American. Only one female-directed film has won best picture (Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker) and this factor alone must have weighed heavily with Academy voters keen to get with the programme.

Zhao's film records the lives of people who deserve better, but have been short-changed by an unjust world. It applauds their resourcefulness, indomitability and humanity. So far, so good, in terms of social justice credentials, but, as a campaigning blueprint, Nomadland doesn't bear close inspection. Its charismatic characters don't see themselves as victims. Instead of railing against late capitalism, they seem puzzlingly content with their fate.

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman. Photograph: AP

The hero, Fern (Frances McDormand), loses her job when her company town is hit by corporate closure. Nonetheless, she chooses life on the road not solely out of necessity, but also as a way to mourn her dead husband and find her own way forward. When comfortable suburban Americans offer her a home, she turns them down, opting instead for old-fashioned self-reliance. Unforgivably for some, she even seems to enjoy being exploited in one of Amazon's warehouses.

If this seems heedlessly dismissive of progressive orthodoxy, Zhao is unrepentant. She said in September: "I tried to focus on the human experience and things that I feel go beyond political statements, to be more universal." Time, then, to consider this top seed's claim to aesthetic excellence.

There are those who find the film exquisite, but it is hardly a cinematic masterpiece. It saunters through its gorgeous landscapes without tension or jeopardy to no particular effect. Sentimentality saps its portrayal of the community it celebrates: the human flotsam Fern encounters include none of the bad folks that their way of life must inevitably attract.

So, perhaps the favourite has fallen between two stools. If so, we could see the biggest upset since Moonlight pipped La La Land in 2016. This might deliver a stark conflict between politics and art. None of the crusading nominees is badly made. Yet if excellence were the sole criterion, it is hard to believe that it wouldn't be The Father which would bag the statuette.

Florian Zeller's startling account of the impact of dementia might have landed a blow for better treatment of mental illness, a reasonably fashionable topic. Instead, it avoids any such pretension, focusing on conveying human experience without a hint of interest in any cause. In doing so, it yields insight, horror and heartbreak on such a level that compliance with dogma, however well intentioned, would inevitably have inhibited. In comparison, The Father's politically committed rivals lose much of their lustre.

Daniel Kaluuya in Judas and the Black Messiah. Photograph: Glen Wilson/AP

Promising Young Woman hits the spot in terms of current preoccupations in a way of which its makers could only have dreamed. It has successfully provided a totem pole for angry women to rally around. Yet doing this through a stylised, cartoonish romp ensures that the real issues are avoided. The sweet vengefulness of Carey Mulligan's Cassie makes no sense psychologically; nor does the instant penitence of her victims. Never mind - it is all as fantastical as a romcom; it is full of fun and twisty turns. Yet, as such, it obscures rather than illuminates its subject. In the end, it just tells us that rape is bad.

Other progressive candidates on the best picture list are less evasive, yet, on the whole, their tales comfort more than they illuminate. It is easier to challenge the system faced by the Chicago 7 than the more perplexing institutional failures of our day. Our racial woes are no longer those faced half a century ago by the Black Panther Fred Hampton. Taken together, these films can hardly claim that their social relevance pre-empts other considerations.

Nonetheless, according to the bookies, every one of them stands a better chance than The Father of knocking Nomadland from the top slot. This may tell us which way the wind is blowing, but perhaps it is time for film-makers to start blowing back, at least a little.
The Oscars take place on Sunday 25 April.

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Art or activism? The Oscars' identity crisis

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hat is the point of cinema? For most people: entertainment; for some: art. And for a few: a means of shaping attitudes. Such purposes are not mutually exclusive - just ask Ken Loach (or even, perhaps, the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl). Proudly political engagement isn't new.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer, playwright, and actor, discusses in The Atlantic the purpose of art, and what role artists should play in society. 

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Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer, playwright, and actor, discusses in The Atlantic the purpose of art, and what role artists should play in society. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is all art political? What issues can art help us understand? Is the work of artists more urgent than ever? How does art ‘bring stories to the table’? Which matters more - the aesthetics, or the issues?

KEY TERMS Honest, Truth, Politics of the era, Empathy vs. psychological distancing

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And the power of stories that are unshakably true

All art is political. In tense, fractious times-like our current moment-all art is political. But even during those times when politics and the future of our country itself are not the source of constant worry and anxiety, art is still political. Art lives in the world, and we exist in the world, and we cannot create honest work about the world in which we live without reflecting it. If the work tells the truth, it will live on.

Public Enemy's "911 Is a Joke," George Orwell's 1984, Rodgers and Hammerstein's whole damn catalog-all are political works that tell the truth.

Yes, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Consider The Sound of Music. It isn't just about climbing mountains and fording streams. Look beyond the adorable von Trapp children: It's about the looming existential threat of Nazism. No longer relevant? A GIF of Captain von Trapp tearing up a Nazi flag is something we see 10 times a day on Twitter, because all sorts of Nazis are out there again in 2019. As last spring's searing Broadway revival of Oklahoma! revealed, lying underneath Hammerstein's elephant-eye-high corn and chirping birds is a lawless society becoming itself, bending its rules and procedures based on who is considered part of the community (Curly) and who is marginalized (poor Jud ... seriously, poor Jud). Or consider your parents' favorite, South Pacific. At its center, our hero, Nellie Forbush, must confront her own internalized racism when she learns that the new love of her life has biracial children from a previous marriage. Let your parents know if they forgot: Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals form the spine of Broadway's "golden age," and they also deeply engage with the politics of their era.

My first Broadway musical, In the Heights, is an example of how time can reveal the politics inherent within a piece of art. When I began writing this musical, as a college project at Wesleyan University, it was an 80-minute collegiate love story with a promising mix of Latin music and hip-hop, but it was pretty sophomoric (which is appropriate; I was a sophomore). After college, I started from scratch with the director Thomas Kail and the playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, and we shifted the show's focus from the love story to Washington Heights, a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan where everyone is from everywhere. In the 20th century, Washington Heights was often home to the latest wave of immigrants. It was an Irish neighborhood; it was a Russian Jewish neighborhood (Yeshiva University is up there). If you take the Dominican store sign down you'll see a sign for an Irish pub underneath it, and if you take that down you'll find Hebrew. Washington Heights was heavily Dominican when I was growing up, and it remains so, with a vibrant Mexican and Latin American immigrant community as well.
We're in an age when, for some, considering an immigrant a human being is a radical political act.
As we wrote about this Upper Manhattan community on the verge of change, we looked to our musical-theater forebears. In Cabaret, the upheaval facing the characters in Berlin is the rise of the Nazi Party. In Fiddler on the Roof, the town of Anatevka struggles to hold on to its traditions as the world changes around it, and the threat of pogroms looms. For our musical world, upheaval comes in the form of gentrification. This is obviously different from fascism and pogroms; it's not even in the same moral universe. How you begin to dramatize something as subtle and multifaceted as gentrification poses some tricky questions. We threw our characters into the same dilemma faced by their real-life working-class counterparts: What do we do when we can't afford to live in the place we've lived all our lives, especially when we are the ones who make the neighborhood special and attractive to others? Each of the characters confronts this question differently: One sacrifices the family business to ensure his child's educational future. Another relocates to the less expensive Bronx. Our narrator decides to stay, despite the odds, taking on the responsibility of telling this neighborhood's stories and carrying on its traditions.

We received great reviews. If critics had a common criticism, it was that the show, its contemporary music aside, was somehow old-fashioned or "sentimental." Gentrification, the businesses closing, the literal powerlessness as the characters face a blackout that affects only their neighborhood-these issues, always there in the material, didn't register with most theater critics in 2008. In the Heights was considered a hit by Broadway standards. It didn't leap off the Arts page and into the national conversation like Hamilton would, but we won some Tonys, recouped our investment, and had a wonderful three-year run at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where Hamilton now lives. We posted our Broadway closing notice at the end of 2010.

What a difference 10 years makes.

Right now, Jon M. Chu is editing his feature-film adaptation of In the Heights, which is scheduled to be released in June. We spent a joyous summer shooting the film-on location, in our neighborhood-and issues that were always inherent in the text now stand out in bold-faced type. Gentrification has rendered Lower Manhattan, Harlem, and much of Brooklyn unrecognizable to the previous generations that called those neighborhoods home. The East Village of Jonathan Larson's Rent is nonexistent, lettered avenues notwithstanding. And the narrative of immigrants coming to this country and making a better life for themselves-the backdrop of everything that happens in In the Heights, across three generations of stories-is somehow a radical narrative now.

Donald Trump came down the escalator to declare his presidential run, and in his first speech he demonized Mexicans: They're rapists; they're bringing drugs; they're not sending their best people. We young Latinos had thought of our parents and grandparents as the latest wave making its home in this country, and we thought that we would be the next group to make this place a better place, to prove once again that the American dream wasn't just a figment of some propagandist's imagination. And now we're in a different age when, for some, considering an immigrant a human being is a radical political act.

Consider this rap, written 12 years ago and delivered by Sonny, In the Heights ' youngest character, in a song called "96,000":

Your kids are living without a good edumacation,
Change the station, teach 'em about gentrification,
The rent is escalatin'
The rich are penetratin'
We pay our corporations when we should be demonstratin'
What about immigration?
Politicians be hatin'
Racism in this nation's gone from latent to blatant

It was always political. It was always there. Donald Trump made it even more true.

Trump uses language to destroy empathy. He criminalizes the impulse and imperative to seek asylum, to seek a place to live thousands of miles away because the alternative at home is worse. Through his lens, these seekers are not people; they're "animals" or "bad hombres."

What artists can do is bring stories to the table that are unshakably true-the sort of stories that, once you've heard them, won't let you return to what you thought before. I think about the crisis on the border constantly. I think about the famous photograph of a little girl crying beside a Border Patrol truck. That picture went viral because it seemed to capture the horror of family separations. But it turned out that the girl wasn't being separated from her mother-her mother had simply been ordered to put her daughter down while she was searched by agents. The family was in distress, and the border crisis was real, but people used the details of this particular incident to close themselves off from empathy. "Fake news," they said. A child is crying for her mother, but that's not enough to keep people from pushing empathy away. I believe great art is like bypass surgery. It allows us to go around all of the psychological distancing mechanisms that turn people cold to the most vulnerable among us.

At the end of the day, our job as artists is to tell the truth as we see it. If telling the truth is an inherently political act, so be it. Times may change and politics may change, but if we do our best to tell the truth as specifically as possible, time will reveal those truths and reverberate beyond the era in which we created them. We keep revisiting Shakespeare's Macbeth because ruthless political ambition does not belong to any particular era. We keep listening to Public Enemy because systemic racism continues to rain tragedy on communities of color. We read Orwell's 1984 and shiver at its diagnosis of doublethink, which we see coming out of the White House at this moment. And we listen to Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, as Lieutenant Cable sings about racism, "You've got to be carefully taught." It's all art. It's all political.
This article appears in the December 2019 print edition with the headline "What Art Can Do"

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The Role of the Artist in the Age of Trump

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And the power of stories that are unshakably true

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A Guardian article, looking at ‘France’s answer to Banksy’, who fills potholes with colourful mosaics. 

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A Guardian article, looking at ‘France’s answer to Banksy’, who fills potholes with colourful mosaics. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does ‘Ememem’ create his art? What are students’ opinions about his work? Why is he beginning to gain recognition? Finally, offer them a quote from the article: “The goal is to spread a touch of poetry under the jaded soles of our shoes, to provoke a moment of amazement, a smile” To what extent does this sum up the purpose of (all) art?

Key terms Memory notebook, Street art, Anonymity, Legality, Recognition, Enchantment

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ast year, the studio of the Lyon-based artist known as Ememem received an urgent call from an architectural firm close to the city's Place Sathonay. Someone was in the process of dismantling a mosaic he had installed on the pavement in front of their offices. By the time he arrived, the culprit had fled with half of it.

That artwork may have partially disappeared, but many of Ememem's other creations remain dotted throughout the municipality's streets... some 350 and counting. Over the past six years, he has made a speciality of filling divots and potholes with multicoloured mosaics made from tiles of different sizes and different hues, arranged in striking geometric patterns. Some bear his signature, often in the form of an image of a trowel underscored by his name.

Ememem calls himself "the pavement surgeon" and "the pothole knight," and refers to his artworks as "flackings" - a play on the French word flaque, which means puddle. He has written that the works are "a memory notebook of the city. It reveals what happened... Here, cobblestones have been picked up and thrown. There, a truck from the vegetable market tore off a piece of asphalt".

His work has been drawing more and more attention in the city. A local website called HappyCurio spotlights walking tours of them and his Instagram account has 147,000 followers. "He's a star of local street art," says Lisa Mambré, deputy mayor of the Lyon's 9th arrondissement. "His work is so noticeable. Everyone you ask seems to know about it."

Yet while Ememem's works may be very visible he, in contrast, is exceedingly elusive. Like his fellow street artist Banksy, he prefers to retain his anonymity. He refuses to be photographed and doesn't give either phone or face-to-face interviews. Information about him is limited to a short biography and press kit on his official website ( ememem-flacking.net). "It's important for me to remain a little mysterious," he has written. "And it's also because I'm not very talented when it comes to social interactions."

In order to discover a little more about this mysterious artist, I was forced to dig deeper and to reach out to a number of people who have been in touch with him - local politicians, a festival organiser, a gallery owner and even the manager of a tile showroom. Frustratingly, though, most had either never had any direct contact with him or were unwilling to reveal much about his identity, preferring to respect his desire for discretion.

One man who can offer some insight is his agent, Guillaume Abou, who has known him for some 15 years. He offers an intriguing description: "He's someone with a great need to give and to share," he says. "He's quite laid-back, but has had a bit of a turbulent life."

Someone else who has met him is Jeff Carpentier, the director of Planètes Carrelages in Amiens, in the north of France, where Ememem sourced tiles for a flacking he created as part of a local art festival called IC.ON.IC. "He's discreet, but also very communicative and passionate about what he does," he says.

The press kit on Ememem's website notes that he was previously a songwriter with a well-known rock group, but there are no other clues. He has no formal artistic training and initially followed in his father's footsteps by embarking on a career as a house tiler. Abou told me that he speaks French with a foreign accent and further research determined he is of Italian descent. As for the name Ememem, its origins remain enigmatic and Abou will only say, somewhat cryptically: "Even I don't really know. It could come from the first letters of the title of Lou Reed's worst-ever album, Metal Machine Music."

Also slightly questionable is Ememem's assertion that he invented the artform. If you search for "flacking" on YouTube, the first video that pops up is one on a Chicago-based artist called Jim Bachor, who has been filling potholes with mosaics since 2013, albeit with works in a much more figurative style. "Something similar has also existed in South America for quite some time," notes Martine Blanchard, the founder of the Biennale Internationale de Mosaïque Contemporaine in Auray, Brittany.

What is certain is that Ememem created his first "flacking" in February 2016 in an alleyway in central Lyon. They soon became an obsession. "During the first years, he was completely frenetic," says Abou. "He created at least two a week." As the legality of his practice is rather fuzzy (he doesn't ask for authorisation to intervene in the public space), he works exclusively at night. For added discretion, he sometimes adopts disguises or brings along props. Abou recalls how Ememem once dressed up as a plumber and also how he installed cones and red-and-white barrier tape around a pothole in Guadeloupe to give the impression he was doing legitimate work.

Although Ememem does next-to-no self-promotion, his celebrity is spreading way beyond the confines of Lyon. Martine Blanchard took inspiration from him to create 11 different flackings with groups of locals on the fringe of the Auray Biennale. "What I find particularly interesting is the way his creations resemble archaeological remains," she says. Ememem himself has participated in an arts festival called Nuart in both Aberdeen and Stavanger, Norway, and has installed flackings in Madrid, Barcelona and Turin. He has also been approached by a Chilean architectural practice to work on a project in Santiago and Valparaíso.

He is gaining official recognition, too. The authorities of Lyon's 9th arrondissement commissioned six "flackings" and gave followers of their Instagram account clues to track them down. The prestigious Galerie Italienne in Paris included several of his works in a show entitled Ceramics Now in 2021. Consisting of mosaic tiles laid on an asphalt base, they resemble portable "flackings" and sell for between €10,000 and €12,000. "He has a very strong gift for putting different colours together," enthuses the gallery's director, Alessandro Pron, who predicts a sparkling future for Ememem in the world of contemporary art.

Whoever he is and whatever his growing popularity brings, one thing is for sure: Ememem will continue to go out at night to beautify Lyon's damaged roads and pavements. He sees his interventions not only as a service to the community, but also as a means of bringing enchantment to daily life. "The goal," he writes, "is to spread a touch of poetry under the jaded soles of our shoes, to provoke a moment of amazement, a smile."

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France's answer to Banksy: the anonymous street artist filling potholes with colourful mosaics

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ast year, the studio of the Lyon-based artist known as Ememem received an urgent call from an architectural firm close to the city's Place Sathonay. Someone was in the process of dismantling a mosaic he had installed on the pavement in front of their offices.

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This Guardian article considers what characteristics street art needs to have to qualify it as ‘legitimate’ art. 

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This Guardian article considers what characteristics street art needs to have to qualify it as ‘legitimate’ art. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is street art is the “purest art around”? Does understanding what characterises good street art help us to understand what makes art good in general?

Key terms Democratic art form vs. public nuisance

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In the Guide's weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you've been burning to know the answer to - and settle it, once and for all
Surely you must have your doubts. It's all very well for the entire world to laud Banksy's latest mural on a pigsty in Suffolk and have the savvy to rave about Stik (who does stick figures under bridges in London). It appears to be a truth universally acknowledged that street art is subversive, democratic and brilliantly creative. But then you find yourself paused on a train waiting to enter a station, looking at the "art" on a goods shed wall. Someone took risks - legal and physical - to spray-paint those giant letters and curly lines, but the results look about as inspiring as a discarded crisp packet.

Perhaps it is merely money that turns some of this unimpressive stuff into that elevated thing called "street art". Banksy is not just famous, but famous for being highly priced. When he arranged for one of his pieces to destroy itself at an art auction, many people assumed the stunt was intended to enhance his market value still further. Finding a Banksy stencilled on your house is like winning the lottery. If art is defined by value - and in the age of Damien Hirst who's to say it isn't? - that splat on the side of the Co-op deserves the respect due a potential million-quid investment.

"Street art" is a novel market category, devised with Banksy and his imitators in mind. Yet the urge behind it has been around for at least 60,000 years. Human beings just love drawing on walls. In the ice age, people pressed their hands against cave walls and spat ochre pigment to create a red outline. Pretty much the same technique is used today when street artists spray paint over a pre-cut stencil to leave a quick image before the police come.

It may seem irreverent to class ice-age art as graffiti, but before the true antiquity of such art was recognised in the 20th century, people who came across mammoths drawn in caves did actually dismiss them as crude graffiti. And there is no written evidence to prove who made cave paintings or why. Children as well as women and men left handprints in caves. Maybe it was surly stone-age teenagers who skulked underground drawing bison for a bit of a laugh.

So perhaps street art is not only art, but the purest art around. The ancient Roman authority Pliny the Elder and the Renaissance writer Giorgio Vasari both thought the first artist was a woman who traced a shadow on a wall. The modern art theorist Dubuffet took creativity back to its roots when he coined the term Art Brut, "raw art", for marginalised marks including graffiti. Art in the 21st century is technocratic and sophisticated; we have video art, conceptual art, digital art. None of these non-manual genres have much to do with a kid scratching a picture with a stick. But street art mystically returns to the primal urge to make a mark on a blank surface.

So give those doodles by the railway a second look. It isn't just an invention of the art market or media that street art is something special. It is a connection with our deepest creative roots: a connection that may be broken and intermittent, like a signal struggling through the white noise of modern life, but a signal from the ice age all the same. "Here I am. This is my mark. I'm human."

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In the Guide's weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you've been burning to know the answer to - and settle it, once and for all Surely you must have your doubts.

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This BBC article reports on how cleaners on a London Underground train erased a new work off art by Banksy. 

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This BBC article reports on how cleaners on a London Underground train erased a new work off art by Banksy. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What’s the difference between graffiti and art? Was the act of cleaning it part of the piece? How should we judge what is, and what isn’t, art?

Key terms Graffiti, Art

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Banksy Tube graffiti: Cleaners 'unaware it was by artist'

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The artist's piece on a Circle Line train was removed before anyone knew he was responsible for it.

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This Guardian article looks at a Christmas-themed work of art by Banksy. 

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This Guardian article looks at a Christmas-themed work of art by Banksy. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How effectively is art able to explore ethical issues (perhaps in a way that other forms of expression aren’t able to do)?

Key terms Representing themselves, Interactive

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Have a Banksy Christmas: his Birmingham reindeer are an artistic miracle

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Rather than exploit ‘the homeless’, this painting empowers rough sleepers to draw attention to their individuality

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Check out our 8 comparative concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.