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Use the padlet to research the arts (and the other elements of the course) in a real-world context, via a huge range of articles, videos, and podcasts from media sources all over the world.

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Use the padlet to research the arts (and the other elements of the course) in a real-world context, via a huge range of articles, videos, and podcasts from media sources all over the world.

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We have arranged the media sources by 'Big Question' (one of our ways of structuring TOK - see this page of the site for more details). You can also apply them easily to the knowledge framework: Section 1 links to nature and scope; Section 2 links to ethics; Section 3, 5, 6 links to methods & tools; Section 4 links to perspectives.

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The 12 key terms are highlighted - and feature in separate Padlet here.

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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 did an experience in Berlin make Enuma Okoro reflect on a question that has ‘interested her almost obsessively’? What characterizes American artist Jenny Holzer’s work, and how does it make us reflect on our similarities with others? How does the work of Dali and Dadi explore the theme of finding common ground with others? To wrap up: 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

LINKS TO The arts, Human sciences, Knowledge & the knower

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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 Vox article, tracking the changes in movies from the past 50 years that have been based on the atomic bomb.

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A Vox article, tracking the changes in movies from the past 50 years that have been based on the atomic bomb.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Students should divide up into groups, each one focusing on a different film mentioned in the article (from Failsafe in 1964, to Oppenheimer in 2023). You can use the article to carry out a little more research into each one. Briefly outline the main focus and style of your film. What does this tell us about society’s relationship with nuclear weapons at that time? To wrap up: Is the most important purpose of the arts to help us cope with the existential angst that faces individuals and societies?

KEY TERMS Power, Haunted, Existential angst, Mental load, Shaper and reflection of fears

LINKS TO The arts, History, Natural sciences, Technology

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Before the bomb, the destruction of humanity was strictly the purview of the non-human. Whole civilizations told stories of floods or plagues sent by the gods designed to wipe everyone out. People could imagine mass weather events or catastrophes that might end the human race, but in those stories, our role in our own destruction was indirect, at most. No person could just push a button and end it all for everyone.

That changed when the world realized how nuclear power could be harnessed. Now, we could level whole cities, or more, in the blink of an eye, and scientists knew there was a chance we could accidentally light the atmosphere on fire. For the first time in human history, the power to destroy the planet was in our hands. There was no stuffing the evils back into Pandora's box. (Following the Trinity test, which proved the capacity of the bomb he'd spearheaded, J. Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He didn't just mean himself.)

The discovery that any of us, theoretically, can annihilate the whole of humanity - perhaps by accident or on a whim - induces a whole new level of existential angst. There's the fear of sudden death, of course. But then there's a deeper dread, the sense that something in the balance of the universe has shifted. With a deity, you can petition and hope for forbearance. But look, we all know what humans are like.

Even if a person can push that threat of total destruction out of mind for a while, it provokes an ambient anxiety, a permanent mental load. The movie industry has always been both a shaper of fears and a reflection of them, a means for dealing with reality at arm's length, through a big screen. The bomb, and the world that brought it into being, has flooded back into pop culture in recent years, from Manhattan to Asteroid City to Oppenheimer. But that's just the continuation of a long history: no wonder that in the Cold War years just after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, filmmakers were obsessed with the events that could turn "mutually assured destruction" into just "destruction." The movies understood the grave danger and the pitch-black farce of it all.

Which is how we got movies like Fail Safe (1964), a somewhat plodding but haunting Sidney Lumet drama in which a technology failure sets off an international incident that ends in mass destruction. Characters throughout the film espouse varying and somewhat academic views on whether a nuclear war, and the mass deaths that would ensue, would be a necessary evil to exterminate Communism. Yet rubber meets the proverbial road when a computer issues an erroneous order to strike; by the end of the movie, we're watching ordinary people get exterminated in a nuclear bomb explosion.

There were many movies like Fail Safe during the Cold War, somber dramas that understand the weightiness of the destructive power now in the hands of fallible humans. The 1966 pseudo-documentary The War Game, for instance, portrays the effects of an all-out nuclear war on ordinary citizens - most notably, by the end, children whose futures have been obliterated before their eyes. Nearly a generation later, films like The Day After (1983) and Threads (1984) were still at it. Meanwhile, Japanese filmmakers dealt over and over with the grief and psychological trauma of a country that saw the bomb firsthand, developing everything from the Godzilla films to Barefoot Gen (1983) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988) to process the complexity of the ongoing wound.

While many movies took an appropriately grave stance, there was a bleak comedy to it all, a sense of total absurdity that shone through perhaps the most famous nuclear film of the Cold War: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick's 1964 barnburner. In Strangelove, doctrines of mutually assured destruction and the wielding by powerful men of powerful weapons are cast in slyly phallic terms, suggesting that if humanity wipes itself out it will be mostly because of some horny, insecure men. The film once more ends with footage of detonating bombs (for which it uses footage of actual bomb tests, including the Trinity test). A less satirical but still light touch pops up in WarGames (1983), about a teenage hacker who accidentally gains access to a DoD mainframe computer that simulates nuclear war and almost starts World War III. (Ronald Reagan was reportedly obsessed with WarGames.)

During the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war in films was literal, not a metaphor ( Strangelove's phallic fixation notwithstanding). Mutually assured destruction was something you just knew about, as an average person on the street; it was something you could both fear and joke about, fodder for gallows humor and nightmares. A couple of generations of kids had been trained in how to hide under the desk in case of a nuclear blast, just as their children and grandchildren would participate in active shooter drills decades later. The president was on TV proposing policies to shoot weapons out of the sky from space. The ability to wipe out humanity felt concentrated in a couple of words: A-bomb, H-bomb, thermonuclear warfare.

Yet somewhere in the last few decades, "nuclear warfare" has fallen out of most people's consciousness, at least on a daily basis. I was in the second grade when the Soviet Union was dissolved, and I never learned to hide under my desk. Activists, military strategists, and people whose jobs depend on thinking about nuclear warfare know that the threat is hardly gone, but the ordinary person on the street, when asked what worries them most about the end of humanity, is thinking of different matters.

There are always exceptions to the rule, of course; several guys living off the grid on the fringes of New York City in the new season of How to With John Wilson cite "nuclear war" as one of the things they feel safe from. (Nobody could accuse them of perfect logic.) But even the movies have abandoned nuclear warfare as the scary way to raise the stakes in a blockbuster. Now it's comic book villains or climate change, or (as in the recent Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One), sentient AIs gone rogue.

Curiously, though, as a culture we've started to circle back around to the Manhattan Project - perhaps, you might say, as a way to process the present. We live in the world that Oppenheimer and his team created, a world that seemingly would have eventually been created by someone, whether American or German or Soviet scientists. It's a new stage in human history, in which we have the power previously reserved for the gods. And plenty of us are thinking about it all the time. The feeling of doomsday lingers thickly today; the real question isn't whether you feel as though the world is ending but how you think it will end and why, and what you plan to do about it.

In the midst of this, the origin of this power is worth reexamining, both as a moment where the cat permanently escaped the bag and a metaphor for a lot of other "bombs," some that are slowly detonating. There was, for instance, the excellent TV drama Manhattan, which premiered in 2014 and explored the lives of the scientists and their families at Los Alamos. The Hiroshima bombing was the backdrop for a painful ( and controversial) sequence in Eternals (2021); the question of atomic destruction and the survival of man is threaded throughout Alan Moore's Watchmen comic (1986) and its adaptations as a film (2009) and as a TV series (2019).

Even more recently, Wes Anderson's Asteroid City presents a story of Cold War-era dread, with bomb tests occurring in the background every so often. The feeling that destruction could be around any corner is what powers the film, which ultimately is a reflection on how we use art to set ourselves apart from existential angst and grief and process it at arm's length. And then there's Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's R-rated juggernaut that's less a biopic and more a movie about power and its production, from the atomic level to the geopolitical.

Part of the reason Oppenheimer is so successful, and so brilliant as a document of our time, is that it latches onto exactly this fact about the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. These were not events that stand in isolation as acts of war. They are events with long, long fallouts, decades of people whose lives and health and families and existence are scarred by having been targeted, and others whose geographic separation from the events allowed them to pretend a psychological separation, too.

Yet the stories we tell about the nuclear age betray us. We are afraid. At best, we learn how to avoid thinking about it too much. Any apocalypse, however, is a moment of unveiling, and since then we have lived through wave after wave of new apocalyptic discoveries, to the point where we're just waiting to see which one will be the big one. The stories we tell evolve a little, but what they tell us is all the same. We have become gods, and also, the bringer of death.
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The nuclear bomb's enduring, evolving place in pop culture

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The destructive potential of the bomb has haunted pop culture since the Cold War. But it's different now.

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A Guardian article looking at the life and work of Francoise Gilot, a painter who was overshadowed by “a man she left in the 1950s” - Picasso. 

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A Guardian article looking at the life and work of Francoise Gilot, a painter who was overshadowed by “a man she left in the 1950s” - Picasso. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How important an artist figure is Francoise Gilot, according to the article? Why is her reputation ‘in the shadow’ of Picasso - and why does the article argue that this is ‘blatant sexism’? What context should people be rooted to in order to assess their achievements? Students can also check out this Arts Newspaper article, looking at a new work by Tracy Emin, consisting of 45 portraits of women on the doors of the National Portrait Gallery in London. To wrap up: how should we objectively assess the lives of significant figures in the fields of the arts, science, and other areas of knowledge, and how can biases impede us when we try to do this?

KEY TERMS In the Shadow, Blatant sexism, The patriarchy, Context

LINKS TO The arts

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n the evening of Tuesday 6 June, it was announced that the artist Françoise Gilot had died. Having lived to the age of 101, she had a career that spanned a staggering eight decades - leaving behind 1,600 paintings and 3,600 works on paper. She was also the acclaimed author of internationally bestselling books, one recently reissued by New York Review Books Classics.

An artist from the get-go, Gilot declared at the age of 21 that she "felt painting was my whole life", and her output ranges from portraits to landscapes, still lifes to collage. Often luminously coloured, her work uses angular shapes that intersect to make up a beach scene, a cityscape, a speeding comet or a mother and child. But she also turned to monochrome: her 1994 Aspects of Femininity challenged the multitudinous ways women are perceived, while her 1946 work Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple had hard-edged lines in its re-examination of the Biblical tale, focusing on temptation, punishment and the blaming of women. Her work now features in the collections of the Met and MoMA in New York, as well as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2021, her 1965 work Paloma à la Guitare fetched $1.3m at Sotheby's.

How would she have felt to see her life reduced to a relationship she had in her 20s?

Gilot, the daughter of a ceramicist mother and lawyer father, received a bachelor's degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne, and another in English literature from Cambridge University. Although initially interested in law, she switched to art full time due to "security reasons", after the Germans invaded Paris. Sadly, her early work disappeared after a cart carrying all her family's possessions crashed during the war.

Her first exhibition took place in 1943, when she was just 22. Her first book, detailing the life of her artist-lover, was published in 1964, despite the former partner trying to block it on multiple occasions. Gilot was sharp and formidable. When Emma Brockes interviewed her for the Guardian in 2016, she called her " fierce and uncompromising ". In 2010, Gilot was named a member of the Légion d'Honneur.

Sharp and formidable ... Françoise Gilot in 2003, in front of her painting Night Sky. Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy

But when it came to the headlines announcing her death, the media had other concerns. Instead of honouring and remembering her as the accomplished woman she was, The New York Times wrote: "Françoise Gilot, Artist in the Shadow of Picasso, Is Dead at 101." The Guardian followed with " painter and muse to Picasso "; The Washington Post defined her as "celebrated artist, writer and muse to Picasso"; ARTNews wrote that she was an "Artist Who Fearlessly Chronicled Her Relationship with Picasso".

My question is: does his name really have to be mentioned? Aren't her career, her achievements, her name, enough to stand on their own? When will the media stop referring to women in relation to a partner they split from over seven decades ago, and perpetuating this blatant sexism?

The New York Times's subheading originally read: "An accomplished painter (and memoirist) in her own right, she did what no other mistress of his had ever done: She walked out." The subheading has since been corrected from "mistress" to "lover", considering their relationship lasted almost a decade, and the words "in her own right" have been removed. But I want to touch on those four words. This unnecessary parenthesis appears far too commonly, especially with women. It is used to highlight something that is "other" to what the establishment considers the default: the patriarchy.

In 1997, the New York Times announced: 'Dora Maar, a Muse of Picasso, Is Dead at 89'

This isn't about removing or cancelling certain stories and details. At times, they are important. But we must be respectful to someone's life and how they lived it, what they achieved. If we need to root people to something else, in order to guide readers, could this not be social and political context?

How do you think Gilot would have felt at her life being reduced to a headline that referred to a relationship she had in her 20s? In that 2016 interview, Brockes wrote: "She has always pointed out that it does her a great disservice as an artist to identify her as 'Picasso's lover' or 'a friend of Matisse'" - because she was so much more than that. Similarly, in 1997, the New York Times's story about the death of Dora Maar - a pioneering artist working in photography, painting, and photomontage - merely addressed her as " Dora Maar, a Muse of Picasso, Is Dead at 89 ", while perpetuating the problematic concept of the muse.

Rearranging sentences or using alternative phrases to honour someone's life in a respectful manner isn't hard, and the media should not default to rooting women as the muses of, the wives of, or in the shadow of. We must also assume that the reader is intelligent and interested enough to click on the article without such headlines - because if it's not being done now, then how will the landscape ever change? No one lives "in the shadow" of anyone - especially a person whose light clearly blazed so brightly. As Gilot said: "I live my own life in my own way."

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'Blatant sexism': why is a great painter who lived to 101 still defined by a man she left in the 1950s?

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Françoise Gilot had a career that spanned eight decades and her work now fetches over $1m. Yet when this astonishing woman died last week, the headlines were more interested in her former lover

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An FT article, considering what we can learn by engaging with art that deprioritises western belief and knowledge systems.

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An FT article, considering what we can learn by engaging with art that deprioritises western belief and knowledge systems.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Choose one of the following works of art from the article: The Prophecy, by Fabrice Monteiro; Still Standing, by Victor Ehikhamenor; The world is not what exists but what happens, by Cassi Namoda. What does each work represent? How do they challenge our perspectives? What are your personal takeaways from the work of art you are looking at? When you’ve finished, swap your responses with other members of the class. Overall, do you agree that “we have much to learn from engaging with art that deprioritises western belief and knowledge systems”?

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.

KEY TERMS Perspectives, Sacred, Unlearning and relearning, Memory

LINKS TO Indigenous societies, The arts

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As I'm writing this column I'm preparing to go to Sharjah, to view the art at the Sharjah Biennial. One of the things I love about art is how it can challenge our perspectives and invite us to reflect on our allegiances, belief systems and actions. We inhabit a world that has historically valued western knowledge systems over non-western, traditional or indigenous ways of understanding. But we have much to learn from engaging with art that deprioritises western belief and knowledge systems.

Many west African cosmologies share some variation of the idea that the Earth and the natural world are sacred and should be afforded a particular reverence by humans. The Prophecy is a photo series by the Beninese-Belgian photographer Fabrice Monteiro, which he began in Senegal in 2013. "Untitled # 1" is one of several images of mythological-looking characters made from pieces of garbage and transformed into living, walking allegories of ecological and environmental crises in Senegal, among them water pollution and plastic waste.

In this work, a giant female figure rises up from a mound of refuse like a towering deity about to cast a judgment on humanity. She stands above an ominous landscape, dense bushes interspersed with carpets of rubbish and smouldering with smoke. Influenced by the Greek myth of Gaia, Monteiro created a narrative that a tired Mother Earth has sent her spirit children to prophesy to humanity about the consequences of how they are treating the natural world. Inherent in these warnings is the idea that human behaviour towards the rest of creation is partly the result of a broken relationship between the two, and our human inability to recognise any life force other than our own.

Monteiro was also inspired by west African masquerades. Looking at his work, I was taken back to a memory from my childhood when my family lived in Nigeria. It was a season for masquerades. At some point in the day, larger-than-life totem-like figures with masks and streams of raffia would begin to parade through the streets, hollering, beating instruments and dancing in elaborate, colourful costumes - extraordinary even on the vast landscape of my childhood imagination. I was terrified by these figures because I didn't think they were human.

Monteiro created a narrative that a tired Mother Earth has sent her spirit children to prophesy to humanity about the consequences of how they are treating the natural world

In my own Igbo tradition, many masquerades are representative of a relationship between the spirit and the human world, implying ancestors and those in the spiritual world are invested in what we humans get up to. Though I didn't fully understand it or have the language to articulate it, I knew this spectacle was symbolic of the fluidity of borders between the earthly and the transcendent. I have never had trouble believing in a thin line between earthly and spiritual realities.

Monteiro's work draws also on elements of animism, primarily the belief that humans are not the only ones with a life force energy or a spiritual essence. Whatever we might think of that idea, the way we treat creation might be significantly affected if we were open to the possibility that rivers, lakes, oceans, plants, trees, mountains and other animals have the potential to possess some aspect of a soul, and that a spirit world existed that ached at the broken relationship between humanity and the rest of creation.

The 53-year-old Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor has been working for years on pieces that speak to the collision of African and western cultures. Ehikhamenor was born in Edo state, whose capital is Benin City, and was raised with both the traditional religious beliefs of his grandfather and the Catholic faith of his schooling. "Still Standing" (2022) is a 12ft mixed-media image of Oba Ovonramwen, ruler of the Benin Kingdom who went into exile after the 1897 razing and looting of Benin City by British forces. The Oba's traditional gown, headdress and accessories were made in Ehikhamenor's Lagos studio from thousands of orange, red and white rosary beads. Hanging on the gown are miniature Benin bronze ornament masks, a nod to the theft by the British of these precious cultural and religious artefacts; the artist cast them in Benin with traditional bronze-casters. The background is made of thousands of white rosaries that glow in the dark.

Works such as "Still Standing" aim to open a dialogue about how African cultural and religious knowledge was affected by the colonial project. Commissioned as part of a series that asked artists to respond to monuments in St Paul's Cathedral, London, the work was displayed next to the memorial brass of Harry Rawson, the British admiral who led the 1897 Benin expedition. It has now been acquired by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which last year agreed in principle to return its own collection of Benin bronzes to Nigeria.

In "The world is not what exists but what happens", 34-year-old Mozambican artist Cassi Namoda paints an almost folkloric image of a small trail of people moving along a formless waterscape, united by the labour of carrying a large, thick cloth. The figures seem to float across the canvas in front of a curvaceous, tangerine-coloured mountain range. The clouds are swaths of coral, caramel, soft pink and sky blue. A tiny blood-red moon hangs at the top right-hand corner of the frame. In the lower half, on the right hand side, is a faint outline of a ladder in the water; perhaps a portal to another realm, an underworld open to the traversing of beings between different realities.

Some of Namoda's work is inspired by Kenyan philosopher, theologian and writer John Mbiti, an ordained Anglican priest. In his seminal 1969 book African Religions and Philosophy, he suggested traditional African religious ideas should be afforded the same level of respect as other global faiths (although he was criticised by some for applying a Christian worldview to African cosmologies).

Mbiti also posited a uniquely African understanding of time, marked by two distinct time periods, the Sasa and the Zamani. Sasa time includes the present and recent past; Zamani time includes the far past and an immeasurable past. According to his book, when a person dies, they remain in Sasa time until the last person who can remember the deceased also dies. Then the person is considered to be in Zamani time.

When I look at Namoda's painting with this concept in mind, I see a lineage of people, connected by a literal fabric of time. Those at the back carry the events of the past, recognising how they affect how the people at the front exist in present time. The two people at the front are covered and immersed in the wide breath of the present, as they move towards a future no one can see.

I think there are gifts in being open to the belief that the way we live our lives in the present can be deeply marked by patterns and behaviours from our ancestral past, suggesting we inherit more from those who came before us than just physical characteristics. It can be empowering to consider that some of our behaviour or ways of living in the world are inherited from our ancestors, offering an opportunity for unlearning and relearning as we make our way through the world.
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As I'm writing this column I'm preparing to go to Sharjah, to view the art at the Sharjah Biennial. One of the things I love about art is how it can challenge our perspectives and invite us to reflect on our allegiances, belief systems and actions.

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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 What is dip hop, and how has it developed over time? What methods do some dip hop artists use to further immerse their audience, and what role does technology play in this? Why have dip hop artists struggled to achieve recognition as musicians in their own right? Students can also check out this great story on the origins of Hip-hop. To wrap up: “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

LINKS TO The arts, Language, Technology

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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 Vox video, exploring the process and time required to use AI to create convincing art. 

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A Vox video, exploring the process and time required to use AI to create convincing art. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How long does it take the creator of Stelfie to create his AI art? In what ways is his method more complicated than the way AI-generated art is generally portrayed in the media - and why do you think this dissonance exist? Check out the rest of his art - what theme does he explore, and do you like it? Overall, do students agree with the statement at the end of the video: “AI is not a threat, it is an opportunity for talented people to jump on a new branch of art”. What are the implications of this in terms of the development of art?

KEY TERMS Realism and details, Steps, Overall process, Joint effort, Opportunity

LINKS TO The arts, Technology

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An Artnet article and video, looking at a documentary that examines the extent to which pop art icon, Roy Lichtenstein, plagiarized his work. 

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An Artnet article and video, looking at a documentary that examines the extent to which pop art icon, Roy Lichtenstein, plagiarized his work. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE To what extent did Lichtenstein ‘borrow’ ideas from comic book artists (focus particularly on All-American Men of War #89, drawn by Russ Heath, and Roy Lichtenstein’s Blam)? What point is made in the article about this appropriation being possible because of the ‘chasm that divides “high art” and “low art”? Do students think that the non-acknowledgement of the role of the original artists undermines the work of Lichtenstein? Overall, does art become less legitimate the more it borrows from other work?

KEY TERMS Appropriation artist vs. plagiarist, Theft, “High art” and “low art, Draftsmen, Acknowledgment, Essential part

LINKS TO The arts

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Was Roy Lichtenstein an Appropriation Artist or Plagiarist? A New Documentary Probes the Ethics of His Multimillion-Dollar Comic Art Empire | Artnet News

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The documentary 'WHAAM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation' dissects the pop artist's appropriation of comic art.

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A Guardian article, in which two art experts try to distinguish between human art, and art created by AI. 

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A Guardian article, in which two art experts try to distinguish between human art, and art created by AI. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do the critics try to tell them apart? How successful are they in distinguishing them? What does this indicate about the sophistication of AI art? Overall, can AI technology reproduce the emotional depth that characterizes great art? What are the implications if it can - does it mean the end of human art?

KEY TERMS Emotional depth, Authenticating, Genuine, Deficiencies, Spontaneous and creative, Obvious

LINKS TO The arts, Technology

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he year 2022 was when AI-generated images went viral. Online, you may have come across very realistic yet suspiciously improbable images of, say, an astronaut riding a horse through space or an avocado doubling as an armchair.

Numerous new generators - including Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion - offer anyone with an internet connection the chance to conjure up their own strange apparition, simply by typing in a "prompt" for the AI. (For example, "astronaut astride horse on Mars". Or, for this article, "Mark Rothko Abstract Expressionist oil painting" - yes, the image above isn't a real Rothko.) The possibilities have been endless, the opportunity for meme-making infinite.

It should not be surprising that a great many artists who have spent a lifetime honing their skills are a little put out by this latest disruption. Are companies going to keep hiring designers when they can produce prototypes themselves for free? Will budgets stretch to include animators if their hand can be imitated from a simple text description? Advocates of AI have insisted that creatives should have nothing to worry about and can adapt their process to incorporate or work around technological advances, much like the modernists did with the invention of photography.

But if those historical greats were alive and working today, would they also be watching their backs? And could a computer ever hope to reproduce the emotional depth that gives great art its charm and meaning?

To find out, we set a challenge for three art experts: Bendor Grosvenor, art historian and presenter of the BBC's Britain's Lost Masterpieces; JJ Charlesworth, art critic and editor of ArtReview; and Pilar Ordovas, founder of the Mayfair gallery Ordovas. Each was invited to look at pairs of artworks of a similar style and period over Zoom to see if they could tell which was generated by a machine. All three admitted to finding it tougher than expected ...

Bendor Grosvenor "When authenticating a painting, composition is usually the last thing I would look at, after brushstrokes and condition. The one on the left looks like New Zealand, with the cows a bit plonked in and the grass not particularly well painted - but I quite like the way the light falls on the hills. There's something about the picture on the right that looks a bit too good to be true. It's got the bright, contrasty clouds of a Constable and the winding river reminds me of the French Barbizon school. If you asked a computer to make a Constable, that's probably what it would come up with."

Verdict: correct "I think the AI image is quite impressive, actually. It's like a blend between a Corot and a Constable. I can't even draw a smiley face so take my artistic input with some scepticism, but I would say it needs a figure or a little boat to give it a focal point."

JJ Charlesworth "Landscape can mean a lot of things from a lot of places, and there's also the matter of whether it's good. On the painting on the right, there's something a bit confused at the edges and I'm not sure where the river goes ... but then some painters wouldn't have been too bothered about that. The left one seems to recall the American grand landscape painters. The foliage is weird at the front but the mountains have a humidity haze, there's the cows and a little ship puttering away. My hunch is that the left one is real, by a very conventional painter who understands the codes of the genre."

Verdict: correct "The modernist artists privileged compositional coherence with a degree of lyricism. It's easy for critics to detect when someone is doing it badly, but the machine doesn't notice. That tree in the middle is clumsy and I don't know whether a painter interested in how to put together a picture would have done it."

Pilar Ordovas "In real life, I would always look at the surface and the application of paint and would never judge an artwork from an image on Zoom. The one on the left doesn't feel real to me but, then again, I'm sure there is a landscape that looks like this somewhere in the world. With the one on the right, I can feel the water, the trees and the air, whereas the above painting just feels flat to me and pixelated, so I think it's fake."

Verdict: wrong "I wouldn't normally give judgment on a painting without viewing it in real life. I look at the right-hand picture and think of Corot and a number of other artists, so that's what it's done, right?"

BG "Even if these were two genuine works I wouldn't know where to begin. I can't think of anything interesting to say about either of them. One is probably an extremely famous thing that I should know about but I'm so rubbish on abstract art. I would go for the AI one being the squiggly one on the left because I feel there's something a little bit digitised about some of those scratch marks to the right. The picture on the right feels like the product of ... oh, I don't know! Yes, I'll stick with the one on the left being the AI."

Verdict: wrong " Well, the one on the right is better than the one on the left in my opinion. I don't really have that kind of thing on my wall but if you offered me the choice, I would actually go for the AI one. There's something slightly pleasing about the colours and shapes, a bit like a Ben Nicholson."

JC "Abstraction is obviously very anti-conventional and isn't anchored in figuration, so you have to assess each one on their own merits. There's actually more diversity in the left one, there's a deployment of these scratch marks that is quite complicated ... Put it this way, I find myself more drawn to it. The elements are speaking to each other more so it seems to have a motive. The right hand picture is pleasant enough but there is less structuring principle so, if it were by a human, I would struggle to care much about it."

Verdict: correct "With this genre it's very hard and the idea of cohering logic is important. Most abstract paintings come from a debate about what's necessary in the mind of the artist, rather than what's arbitrary. The one on the left seemed more subtle, but could be simulated from having seen too many Cy Twomblys."

PO "I'm not sure about the shapes and the lines in the image on the left, but it does make me think of very early Pollock, though less colourful. The one on the right could relate to many early works from some of the abstract expressionists or, perhaps, Tancredi and certain Italian artists from the 1950s and 60s. I'm sure the AI is looking at these existing works in order to create something based on them but I would still say the one on the right is real."

Verdict: wrong "When it's not by a particular artist you know very well, it's much harder to determine what feels wrong. With a specific artist you look at how they worked at a particular time, their colours, their compositions and what the feel of it should be. If it could be any artist, it's a bit random."

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BG " The plate of apples on the left looks like an Adriaen Coorte - quite sophisticated and I like the reflection on the plate. The flowers look quite simplistic and the petals don't quite work but I think you're playing a bit of a trick on me here ... because you can get still lifes from the period that look quite clunky and that's part of their appeal. So it's very tricky! The image on the right is full of what you would want to describe as deficiencies: the tablecloth looks like a bit of folded-up cardboard. However, I think it might be genuine because I can see cracks on the surface that I don't think the AI would put there. If it has, it's very, very clever."

Verdict: wrong "Really? Wow, I didn't know it could do that. Well that's very good."

JC "The right one looks familiar. You get the over-stylised flowers in quite a number of still lifes. The bland apples, or pears, whatever they are, on the left ... I think there's a rather clumsy idea of which side you put the red on and I find them rather lifeless and dull. There is too much attention on the reflection on the plate, the colouration seems wrong and I'm not sure why the leaves are so decayed. It could be an artist who nobody bought very much of because he was depressing. On a snap judgment, I'm inclined to say that one is fake."

Verdict: wrong "Well, there are a few alarm bells. There's a slightly confused moment where that red flower on the left is curling off a stem that seems to connect with the blue one. These paintings were aspiring to realism before the existence of photographic realism, so there is often a peculiarity in pre-photographic painting."

PO "The picture on the right looks more like a Dutch still life for me with the flowers. The colours are not quite right but it could be a terrible reproduction. The one on the left looks more Spanish than Dutch to me. The imperfect leaves on the pear are really good, as is the shadow on the plate, so I think that one is real. Still lifes are all about symbolism and the fragility of life, with the wilted leaves sort of eaten up. It relates more to what the artist would have been interested in then."

Verdict: correct "The work on the right just feels empty of all the meaning that you would expect to see in this period. Still life is not just a beautiful vase of flowers or fruits, it's actually laden with feeling. With abstract art it's much more random, so with that it may be harder to make a judgment."

BG The image on the left, from what I can see, is quite spontaneous and creative. I can see sketchiness and the canvas is showing through, whereas the one on the right looks a bit glossy. I'm a little suspicious about the cobbles, they look off as does the tree - or the lamp-post, is it a lamp-post? - on the far right ... I want to say the image on the left is genuine but who is the woman talking to? It looks like a splodge. I'll go with it being human made just because it feels a little bit more rough and ready.

Verdict: correct Well I should know what a Manet looks like, but at least I figured out it was by a human! The picture on the right is almost a little bit too good to be true, like the computer's trying a bit too hard to do a Pissarro or something like that.

JC The one on the right is too orderly, it strikes me that the depth is a little bit obvious and the trees are too repetitive. It feels like an image that understands 3D modelling rather than looking. The one on the left has all the curious incoherence of impressionist preoccupations - blurred distance, indifference ... These are human values that have a certain pathos to them and I just don't get that in the other one. Typically, the street scene was about time, place and boredom, but this seems to me to be prosaic, there's no attention to anything and quite a banal mood.

Verdict: correct Creating a sense of attention is not simply a matter of understanding figures and orchestrating them formally, there's also these quite intangible issues of mood, place and emotion. That doesn't necessarily mean it couldn't have been an image generated by an AI trained on Manet.

PO With impressionism, the surface would tell you everything. However, in the work on the right the colours look off to me and the whites are really, really white. You can hardly see the faces in the foreground. Sometimes with avant garde art you do get odd colours but they make sense and have emotion. This has no depth and the figures look a bit floaty. The composition on the left is very different. It looks like it has a pastelly finish, which may be the AI imitating pastel but there is something that rings more true.

Verdict: correct It's interesting how in the picture on the right, the two figures near the front are almost faceless but in the image on the left you see a face, so it feels human. I am surprised, I thought these comparisons were going to be more obvious but they weren't at all in some cases.

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Is this by Rothko or a robot? We ask the experts to tell the difference between human and AI art

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he year 2022 was when AI-generated images went viral. Online, you may have come across very realistic yet suspiciously improbable images of, say, an astronaut riding a horse through space or an avocado doubling as an armchair.

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An Art Newspaper article, which examines Robbie Williams’s claim that “anybody can do art.” 

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An Art Newspaper article, which examines Robbie Williams’s claim that “anybody can do art.” 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why does Robbie WIlliams feel that he can be an artist? Does his work seem to support this? How does he justify his opinion that anyone can be an artist? Why might Sotheby’s be interested in establishing a relationship with him? Students can research his work, and that of other celebrities - how successful are those who don’t have a non-visual background in producing visual art? Finally, students can answer the question: can anyone create art?

KEY TERMS Chance, Multiple narratives

LINKS TO The arts

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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He was a boy band idol and now wants to be an art market darling-pop superstar Robbie Williams has unveiled 14 large-scale works at Sotheby's London, co-created with Ed Godrich (( Black and White Paintings, until 25 May) under the moniker Williams Godrich. All 14 paintings-a swirl of white motifs on black canvases drawing on street and Outsider art-have female names such as Linda, Donna, Paula and Tracy, recalling Williams's 1980s upbringing in Stoke-on-Trent, UK.

Ed Godrich, the co-founder of the Godrich Interiors company, says in a statement: "All the characters are in our head and they come to life as the painting develops. Sometimes a character will emerge by mistake, or part of a figurine will happen by chance because of the direction of a single brushstroke. Robbie might see something completely different when it's his turn to draw, that's why our works take on multiple narratives."

Williams told that watching Banksy's documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, prompted the art project. "I was like, Oh f***! Anybody can [do] art. So I went down to the art-supply shop and bought everything and started doing things in my garage, which were shit, and then got a bit better."

In the interview he also discusses another famous musician who has turned to art. "Bob Dylan is in that category where, if he did a shit on a Chevrolet, people would go, 'That is the best shit that's ever been laid on a Chevrolet,'" Williams adds. "I look at Dylan's stuff and think, 'I could do that.'"

Sotheby's is deepening its relationship with Williams. In March, the Take That star consigned three Banksy paintings at Sotheby's in London including Girl With Balloon (2006, est £2m-£3m) which sold for £2.8m. Last month meanwhile, Williams Godrich selected works for the auction house's Contemporary Curated series which included one of the pair's own pieces ( Beverly, est £15,000-£20,000). According to The Guardian, the painting sold to a private foundation in Central America, priced at £40,320 (the prices for the Black and White Paintings, to be sold privately, are undisclosed).

According to the Sotheby's website, artists represented in Williams' collection include Banksy, Peter Blake, Christopher Page and Morris Wade. Godrich says he collects works by artists such as Tracey Emin, Christopher Page, Jim Page Roberts and Jonas Wood.

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'Oh f***! Anybody can do art': pop star Robbie Williams shows new paintings at Sotheby's

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He was a boy band idol and now wants to be an art market darling-pop superstar Robbie Williams has unveiled 14 large-scale works at Sotheby's London, co-created with Ed Godrich (( Black and White Paintings, until 25 May) under the moniker Williams Godrich.

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An FT article that looks at the key characteristics of ‘iconic’ paintings.  

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An FT article that looks at the key characteristics of ‘iconic’ paintings.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Get students to kick this off by offering thoughts on what characteristics a painting (or other work of art) requires to make it ‘great’. Try to get them to support their ideas with reference to actual examples; you could also discuss the difficulties of this issue. Then offer the article. What do people tend to gravitate to when it comes to art? Is this ‘consensus’ truth test a valid way of assessing the arts? How important is it for art to reflect our own experiences? Finally, do you agree with the quote by Van Gogh that the purpose of art “is to console those who are broken by life”?

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.

KEY TERMS Familiar, Reflect our own experience

LINKS TO The arts

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A year after UK museums moved more or less online, what art do we especially want or like? The National Gallery's chart-toppers for the year's most viewed pictures - from lockdown in March 2020 until now, determined by the number of page-views on the gallery's website - are varied and epoch-ranging. The top dozen (of a list of 20) happen, marvellously, to encompass art's history: from Van Eyck's pioneering oil paint realism in 1434 to Monet anticipating abstraction in 1899. Yet the selection is intriguingly far from representing the scope of Trafalgar Square's 2,300-work collection. Rather, it is revelatory of 2020-21's moment of artistic taste and need, and of audience preferences, which museums could bear in mind as they reopen and plan their futures.

The people's choices have certitude. They are strongly composed, sharply defined, brilliantly coloured images: Titian's ultramarine sky, Van Gogh's yellow of happiness, the stately green backdrop of "The Ambassadors". They are also peaceful, domestic and, Turner's elegiac "The Fighting Temeraire" apart, optimistic. The only mock-fierce note is Rousseau playing tigers: "Surprised!"'s big cat, modelled on an animal in Paris's zoo, transposed among surreally enlarged houseplants. Nothing in this list is threatening or even exotic: landscapes are local - the Thames, Suffolk - and extend no further than a Normandy garden.

What we crave is wellbeing in familiar nature. Is there a more crystalline painted example than brightness at noon in "The Hay Wain"? Yet the first British audiences ignored it; only at the 1824 Paris Salon, Constable recorded, did French painters raise the "alarum in my favour", acknowledging "the richness of texture, and attention to the surface of things".

The surface of things is a basic joy of painting, and reproduces well in close-up on screen: the dabbed-on bristling seed-heads and hairy sepals in "Sunflowers"; the lynx fur and pink silk Holbein gives envoy Jean de Dinteville; light entering through a window, catching polished brass chandelier, silvered mirror, so convincingly that we feel, as the painter signed "The Arnolfini Portrait", that "Jan van Eyck was here". Perhaps intense painterly presence is a reason why interiors and still lifes ("The Ambassadors", with its ornamental carpet, globe, lute, is both) take the top slots.

National Gallery director Gabriele Finaldi says of these "indoor scenes with very dressed-up people" that "I am wondering whether they reflect our own experience of being enclosed in our homes during lockdown but yearning to go out and celebrate". TV presenters Ant and Dec, posed as merchant Arnolfini and his wife in a hilarious bathrobe Instagram recreation, spurred interest in the Van Eyck. But a mood of secular comfort and solid naturalism dominates the list: unable to go out, we brought home the real world.

Only one of the top 12 is religious in subject - compared with a third of National Gallery paintings - and it too is a comforting harmonious image of refuge: Leonardo's "Virgin" secluded in a grotto with infants Jesus and Saint John the Baptist. The babies consider each another as they are watched over by one of the most beautiful, diaphanous angels in art. Auden's evocation of museum art in "Musée des Beaux Arts" - "About suffering they were never wrong/The old Masters" - strikes no chord with this list.

Classical narratives here are romantic comedies. Botticelli reverses the sexist order with a clothed Venus and a languid reclining male nude, post-coitally drowsy, sleeping through a conch shell blasting in his ear. Too excited to be decorous, Titian's Bacchus leaps from a cheetah-drawn chariot as Ariadne pirouettes towards him, the dance-like turn accentuated by her swirling scarf: love at first sight is touching, awkward, absurd, true. All the list's figure paintings are about relationships, often delineated through exchanged gazes. There are no solo portraits - human connection, not introspection, is the thread. Even Velázquez's nude stunner "The Rokeby Venus" is attended by a plump innocuous Cupid, in a game of mirrors that is also about how we, the viewers, look.

What makes an iconic picture? Virtuosity matters - Velázquez's control of a single, black-edged brushstroke tracing a line beneath the opalescent body from mid-back to calf; Turner's freedom of swirls, slashes, sprays in the blurred rush of "Rain, Steam, and Speed" - but the alchemy remains mysterious. Of his "Bigger Splash", David Hockney said: "It's a memorable picture but you don't know you're doing them because there's no formula. If there was a formula there'd be a lot more memorable pictures."

Which of the National Gallery's works do you particularly love, and why? Tell us in the comments below

We each have our musée imaginaire; this list carries weight as a collective one. It breaks rules of political correctness - exclusively white dead male European painters - yet is irrefutable: as former National Gallery director Charles Saumarez Smith said ahead of this week's publication of his book The Art Museum in Modern Times, "the greatest works of western European art remain the touchstones of public experience of art". For museums, the challenge of the 2020s is to redress under-representation - the Rijksmuseum has just, for the first time, moved paintings by women into its "Gallery of Honour" alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer; seven solo shows for women, two for men, are scheduled for 2021 at Tate Britain and Modern - without sacrificing prominence of the greats who, as this list celebrates, remain beloved and meaningful for audiences.

None of these dozen pictures is directly political, yet many mark social turmoil: Turner's "The Fighting Temeraire" lamenting the age of sail, Holbein's broken lute string, maths book open at "division", skull streaked across the floor, implying Reformation Europe's tensions. These things are not narrated but felt: every work here is infused with emotion about its subject.

"To get up enough heat to melt those golds . . . it's not everyone that can do it, it takes the energy and concentration of a person's whole being," Van Gogh said of his bud-to-wilting, life-to-death "Sunflowers". The effect of that expressiveness still drives much of our response to art. The chronological gap in this list - nothing between Velázquez, last of the Old Masters, in 1647, and Constable in 1821 - is a snub to rationalism and the Enlightenment: at crisis times, we seek art of feeling.

Van Gogh believed "art is to console those who are broken by life". It is a modern, godless viewpoint, alien to most of the artists on this list. But, in the more ordered language of a square canvas bisected by a bridge, it is where Monet points in 1899. After France tore itself apart in the Dreyfus case, and Renoir and Degas crossed the street to avoid their old colleague Pissarro, Monet withdrew from Paris and in his "The Water-Lily Pond" began depicting what many of us found most comforting last year - retreat to a garden where beauty, coherence and calm shut out tumult beyond.
See the full top 20 list and buy prints at Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first nationalgallery.org.uk

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What makes an iconic painting? The National Gallery's top 12 works

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A year after UK museums moved more or less online, what art do we especially want or like? The National Gallery's chart-toppers for the year's most viewed pictures - from lockdown in March 2020 until now, determined by the number of page-views on the gallery's website - are varied and epoch-ranging.

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A Guardian article, looking at demands from literary translators that they receive more credit for their work. 

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A Guardian article, looking at demands from literary translators that they receive more credit for their work. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why do translators claim they have the “power to change everything”? In what ways is translation an ‘art’, demanding almost as much skill and creativity as the original act of writing? Why is the job of translation still too much for AI to carry out convincingly? Why is the best translation likely to be the translation that is least noticeable? To wrap up: How important is the role of the translator in giving us access to works of art, and building bridges between cultures and nations?

KEY TERMS Overlooked, Power, Slip of the pen, One-to-one equivalences, Building bridges, Cultures

LINKS TO Language, The arts, Politics, Human sciences

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They have often been overlooked in the artistic and literary process, but translators have long claimed they have the power to change everything.

There are tales of myths being born, societies being forged and cities destroyed with just a slip of the pen, such as the supposed translation error that allegedly led to the US deciding to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or the speculation about life on Mars after the mistranslation of an Italian astronomer.

"[In the literary world] there are entire studies dedicated to tearing apart Constance Garnett's many translations of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Gagol, or Helen Lowe-Porter's translations of Thomas Mann," said Richard Mansell, a senior lecturer in translation at Exeter university.

"But there are also plenty of examples where we gain through translation. Would we have the same rich history of the sonnet form in English without the early translations from Petrarch? Or what about the hundreds of expressions in English which stem from the King James Version of the Bible?"

Yilin Wang said she did not receive any credit for her translations of the work of Qiu Jin in the British Museum's China's Hidden Century exhibition. Photograph: Joy M Kaegi Maurer

Last week, the work of translators was in the spotlight after the writer Yilin Wang said she did not receive any credit or reimbursement for her translations of the work of Qiu Jin in the British Museum's China's Hidden Century exhibition.

The museum has since called it an "unintentional human error", removed the segments from the exhibition and offered to pay Wang £150 for the time they were displayed.

But for Wang, a translator, poet and editor who lives in Vancouver, the museum's apology rang hollow. Speaking to the Guardian, she said the removal of her translations felt "retaliatory" and has demanded the British Museum explain its protocol for seeking copyright permissions and outline what had gone wrong.

"It's really important to respect the labour of translators, who are often erased in publishing and academia," Wang said. "Publishers neglect to put the name of translators on covers, book reviewers forget to name translators, and now, this happens.

She added: "Translation is an art, and it takes me just as long to translate a poem as it takes for me to write an original one in English. I have to work hard to research the poet, the times they're living in, and the literary forms they're working in, then find creative ways to convey the spirit of their work in English. Classic Chinese poetry has many cultural idioms, archaic diction, and completely different grammar and syntactical structures to English."

This battle for recognition of translators has been raging for a long time, with the Booker-winning translator Jennifer Croft even saying she won't translate any more books unless her name is on the cover. "Not only is it disrespectful to me, but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they are going to read," she said.

Booker-winning translator Jennifer Croft says she won't translate any more books unless her name is on the cover. Photograph: Manny Carabel/Getty

The sentiment has grown into a campaign, which led to Pan Macmillan vowing to name the translator on book covers.

"But there's still a long way to go," Mansell said. "Of course, translators share many traits with other writers, but there are other skills translators bring to the task, too."

Shaun Whiteside, the former president of the European Council of Literary Translators Associations , said the incident with the British Museum was "a terrible example of the translator being passed over, or treated as a kind of afterthought", which was made worse by the removal of Wang's work from the exhibition.

"As we know, even today translators still often go unmentioned in reviews and even in publishers' catalogues. Translations don't just happen on their own, and translators, like any authors, deserve copyright, royalties, and proper credit and remuneration."

Rebecca DeWald, the co-chair of the Translators Association, said they advocated for translator's visibility because "you cannot understand what you cannot see".

"If you don't know that a book has been translated by a human being, you won't even begin to think about what thought processes and how much work went into producing the translated text," she said.

According to DeWald, the debate around AI in translation was emblematic of this misunderstanding. "Languages do not relate to one another in straightforward, one-to-one equivalences, not even the most cognate ones, so they cannot simply be plotted in a table of x in this language equals y in the other."

Which means the translator always needs to activate their skill in crafting texts the reader wants to read. "It is a different kind of creativity to coming up with the plot for a novel or short story, which involves the imagination of inventing worlds that didn't exist before. Translation is more closely related to crafting poetry, in that sense, as it is predominantly concerned with language itself."

Sara Crofts, the chief executive of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, emphasised that translators played a vital role in building bridges between nations and cultures.

"Yet very often their work is undervalued and invisible. The sign of a good translation is that the reader isn't aware that it is even a translation, making the translators' work, by definition, unseen."

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'Translation is an art': why translators are battling for recognition

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Like any author, translators want to receive credit for their work instead of being treated as an afterthought

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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 In what way has Picasso become a ‘problem’ artist, and how is the Paris Picasso museum approaching this? What role is the designer Paul Smith playing in the exhibition - and why? Does the exhibition make students rethink their original thoughts on exhibitions? For more images and information about the exhibition, students can also check out this Wallpaper article. Overall, 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

LINKS TO The arts, Human sciences, History

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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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A Dazed article and video, discussing the recent sale of Salvatore Garau’s invisible work of art ‘Io Sono’, for €15,000. 

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A Dazed article and video, discussing the recent sale of Salvatore Garau’s invisible work of art ‘Io Sono’, for €15,000. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a fascinating story, which should kick off a great discussion in your classroom. Students should investigate the work of Garau first, and offer their thoughts on ‘Io Sono’. Is this a valid work of art which legitimately “asks you to activate the power of imagination”, or is this an example of a ‘punking’ by an artist? Then think more broadly about art: what distinguishes genuinely creative new approaches to creating art from ones that employ more dubious techniques? Can anything (or nothing) be art? Can anyone be an artist?

KEY TERMS Power of the imagination, Intangible

LINKS TO The arts, Knowledge & the knower, Religion

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How much does 'nothing' cost? €15,000 (£12,900), apparently - according to last month's auction of a sculpture that has no weight, shape, or form by 67-year-old Italian artist Salvatore Garau.

That's right: the artwork, titled "Io Sono" (which translates to 'I am'), is an 'intangible sculpture'.

"The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that nothing has a weight," Garau told Diario AS. "Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us."

After going up for sale in May at the Italian auction house Art-Rite, one (lucky?) bidder outdid the pre-sale estimated value of between €6,000 to 9,000. The accompanying image is, of course, a blank white square.

Along with a certificate of authenticity stamped by Garau himself, the buyer was given instructions on how to display their new, invisible artwork: it must be exhibited in a private house in a roughly five-by-five-foot space free of obstruction.

"When I decide to 'exhibit' an immaterial sculpture in a given space, that space will concentrate a certain amount and density of thoughts at a precise point, creating a sculpture that, from my title, will only take the most varied forms," Garau explained, adding: "After all, don't we shape a God we've never seen?"

Garau has previously explored similar concepts of immateriality and nothingness, with his Buddha In Contemplazione installation - a white square taped onto a cobbled Milan street. "You don't see it but it exists; it is made of air and spirit," he said of the piece. "It is a work that asks you to activate the power of the imagination, a power that anyone has, even those who don't believe they have it."

The video of the work, however, generated a certain amount of cynicism, with commenters writing: "So you really just taped a square and called that a sculpture?" and "The hardest part of modern art is figuring out who's punking who".

Garau believes he has started a 'new, small, authentic revolution' with his vision and will be selling other invisible works.

Artists have long been known to play with and test the concept of value - in 2019, a banana taped to a wall sold for $120,000 at Art Basel. While the recent boom in NFTs (with newly restored Warhol works recently going for $3 million) has also forced us to think about the value of intangible artworks.

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An Italian artist has sold literally nothing for £12,900

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Salvatore Garau's invisible sculptures ask you to 'activate the power of the imagination'

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A Conversation article, looking at political and social events in Iran, and considering how music and dance can be a powerful tool of resistance. 

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A Conversation article, looking at political and social events in Iran, and considering how music and dance can be a powerful tool of resistance. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE  Is the most important characteristic of music (and art in general) that it acts as a “tool for social justice”?

KEY TERMS Forms of resistance, Awareness, Community and collaboration, Social justice, Power

LINKS TO The arts, Politics, Human sciences

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Iranian women are prohibited from singing and dancing in public. Yet many are posting videos on social media dancing and singing along to singer Mehdi Yarrahi's song Roosarito (Your Veil). The wave of videos comes after Yarrahi's August 28 arrest. The Islamic Republic of Iran deemed the song "illegal and inconsistent with the ethical and societal norms of the Islamic community".

Roosarito is one of many anthems that have formed the soundtrack to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that began with the killing of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian Jina Mahsa Amini on September 16 2022 by the morality police. Amini had been arrested for insufficiently covering her hair, in line with Iran's compulsory veiling laws. Since then, the country has seen steady waves of protest for freedom and equality, including, but not limited to, women's rights.

In my research, I look at how music and dance can be forms of resistance and advocacy in human rights struggles, particularly feminist movements.

In Roosarito, Yarrahi advocates for Iranian women's right to optional veiling and reminds listeners that Iranian people "have sacrificed many dear lives in order to achieve freedom and democracy". A few months earlier, his song Soroode Zan (Woman's Anthem) was played and chanted as part of protests across the country.

Perhaps no song encompasses the Woman, Life, Freedom movement as much as Shervin Hajipour's Baraye (For). Hajipour wrote Baraye only days after Amini's death by compiling tweets that expressed Iranians' hopes "for" a future free of oppression and violence. Baraye was performed by artists around the world in an outpouring of support for Iranian people.

Social media channels have been flooded with images of women in Iran singing and dancing in defiance of the regime and its oppression. Most famously, a video of a group of five young women in Tehran dancing in public without the hijab to Calm Down, by Rema and Selena Gomez, inspired a TikTok trend. After the women were arrested, Iranians and non-Iranians began to replicate the dance and post their videos in solidarity.

A global sound

Iran is not the only place where music has been used to raise awareness of social justice issues. In light of the Taliban's efforts to remove women from public life in Afghanistan, two anonymous sisters recorded songs in their homes, hidden under burqas for their own protection. Explaining that their "voice is the voice of women who can't speak and protest", their songs about pain but also hope for change attracted worldwide attention.

In 2019, Chilean feminist collective LasTesis's song Un Violador en Tu Camino (A Rapist in Your Path) became the anthem of the Chilean struggle against state violence. From India and Turkey to the US and Venezuela, feminist movements used LasTesis's song in their protests for gender equality.

There is a strong sense of community and collaboration at the heart of feminist movements. As an art form that relies on participation and fosters community building, music can be valuable for such movements. Listeners are invited to sing along, share music, dance with their communities and make their own performances. Music's important role in many cultures makes it an effective medium for sharing powerful messages and rallying others to join a cause.

Artists have also used their music to bring attention to the causes of their communities. Peruvian singer Renata Flores writes, sings and raps in her native language of Quechua. Combining modern musical genres with traditional Andean instruments and music, she highlights the marginalisation of Indigenous people and their culture.

American-Syrian Mona Haydar rose to fame in 2017 with her song Hijabi. Haydar addresses both the Islamophobia and prejudice against Muslim women in western societies, as well as the misogyny they experience in Muslim communities.

Pakistani female rapper Eva B has also shot to fame. Rapping in Urdu and Balochi, she uses her songs to advocate for women's rights and to address broader issues of her community in Lyari, Karachi.

Music and social change

Music has long been a tool for social justice. From blues to hip-hop, entire musical genres have emerged from the experiences of black Americans in the US. The internet and streaming have made it easier for the music of a wider array of social movements to reach global audiences.

The recent addition of the " best song for social change " category to the Grammy Awards shows that the recording industry also recognises music's importance in activism. The inaugural prize went to none other than Hajipour's Baraye.
A playlist of songs mentioned in this article:
Music's power to inspire social change has not gone unnoticed by oppressive powers in charge. This is evident in Iran's persecution of Yarrahi, Hajipour, the five women from the dance video, Toomaj Salehi (a rapper detained in October 2022 for his support of the protests and sentenced to six years in prison), and Saman Yasin (a Kurdish-Iranian rapper sentenced to death in October 2022 for participating in the protests, currently awaiting a retrial of his case).

Many others who have used their voice and artistry in support of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement have been detained, tortured or worse. Most recently, protester Javad Rouhi died in custody under suspicious circumstances, following accounts of severe emotional and physical abuse by the authorities. Rouhi was arrested in September 2022 after dancing and chanting in the street as part of protests.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have not only banned playing or listening to music, but in July 2023 burned confiscated musical instruments to prevent the "corruption" of citizens with music.

These attempts to suppress artists and the performance of music are a testament to the ability of song and dance to unite people for a collective cause, and to spread a message that is heard far beyond the affected communities.

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In Iran and beyond, arrests of singers and dancers show how music can be a powerful tool of resistance

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Social movements around the world use music in their struggle for freedom and equality.

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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

LINKS TO The arts, Human sciences, Knowledge & the knower

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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 Why was Karl Lagerfeld a controversial choice in terms of the Met Gala theme? Why did Jameela Jamil accuse the fashion world and the liberal elite of ‘slippery tactics and double standards’? Do students feel that anyone who attended the event, or followed it on social media, was ‘complicit in the erasure of truth’? Overall, can (and should) we separate the art from the artist?

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

LINKS TO The arts, Human sciences

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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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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 Although the article is quite long, it’s broken down into an account of several examples of works of art and literature. Get students to choose one. What example did you choose? What issue was it associated with, and how did its ‘visionary imagination’ make an impact on the way people understood the issue? Swap your responses with other students to learn about the other examples in the article. Overall, 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”?

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.

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

LINKS TO The arts, History, Politics, Human sciences

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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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A BBC video and article, looking at Damien Hirst’s decision to burn many of his artwork, and convert them into NFTs. 

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A BBC video and article, looking at Damien Hirst’s decision to burn many of his artwork, and convert them into NFTs. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why is Hirst burning his artwork? What does he mean when he says that he isn’t ‘destroying’ it, he is ‘transforming’ it? Could the process of burning the pictures be described as a work of art - or is it more of a publicity stunt? What does the story reveal about the line between art and business? Overall, what is art: an object, a gesture, a digital artifact, a name, or all of these things?

KEY TERMS Physical artwork vs. NFT, Transformation, Publicity stunts

LINKS TO The arts, Technology

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The artist told buyers who bought pieces from his latest collection to choose either the physical artwork or the NFT representing it.

Those who chose the NFTs were told their corresponding physical piece would be destroyed.

Asked how he felt to be burning the works, Hirst said: "It feels good, better than I expected."

The artist was dressed in silver metallic boiler-suit trousers and matching fire safety gloves as he collected each piece and burned it in a contained fire box.

It has been estimated the works being burned are collectively worth almost £10 million.

Hirst launched his first NFT collection last year, called The Currency, which was made up of 10,000 NFTs, corresponding to 10,000 original pieces of art.

Collectors who bought one had to choose between keeping the NFT or swapping it for the physical artwork.

London's Newport Street Gallery said 5,149 buyers opted for the original artworks while 4,851 chose the NFTs.

Artworks for the non-exchanged NFTs would be destroyed, buyers were informed, with Hirst telling his Instagram followers earlier this week that he would burn the first 1,000 artworks on Tuesday.

The NFTs, which depicted colourful spots, reportedly sold for $2,000 (£1,800) each.

Livestreaming the event, the Turner Prize winner and assistants used tongs to deposit individual pieces stacked in piles into fireplaces in the gallery as onlookers watched.

"A lot of people think I'm burning millions of dollars of art but I'm not," Hirst said. "I'm completing the transformation of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical versions.

"The value of art, digital or physical, which is hard to define at the best of times will not be lost; it will be transferred to the NFT as soon as they are burnt."

The artworks were created in 2016 with enamel paint on handmade paper and each numbered, titled, stamped and signed.

They will be burned until The Currency exhibition closes on 30 October.

Before Hirst burned each artwork, he showed it to a camera to log its unique code to keep track of every piece that had been burnt.

Many have criticised Hirst for burning his own valuable artworks during a cost of living crisis.

"I's almost like Damien Hirst is so out of touch with the real world that he's basically transcended to another plane of existence, populated only by oligarchs and the once-edgy artists they collect," wrote Time Out's Eddy Frankel.

"Still, look at it this way, even if you can't afford to turn on your heating at home, just go to Newport Street Gallery: it's free and it should be nice and toasty with all those £20,000 paintings on fire."

Hirst, who is no stranger to what some critics describe as publicity stunts, rose to fame during the 1990s Young British Artist scene.

He picked up the Turner Prize in 1995 and his work has sold for millions, but he is also one of Britain's most controversial artists.

Much of his work has divided critics, including one featuring a dead shark floating in formaldehyde and another consisting of a bisected cow and calf.

The 57-year-old is also known for his spot paintings and "For The Love Of God", a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with diamonds.

Speaking to the BBC about his art in 2018, he said: "If I put it in a skip outside a pub, would someone take it home? And you think, 'yeah, they would.' If it's good, it won't get left in the street. I think that's a good way of working out if a painting's good or not."

NFTs are "one-of-a-kind" assets in the digital world that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property, but which have no tangible form of their own.

The digital tokens can be thought of as certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets.

Traditional works of art such as paintings are valuable precisely because they are one of a kind.

But digital files can be easily and endlessly duplicated.

With NFTs, artwork can be "tokenised" to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold.

NFTs soared in popularity last year as crypto-rich speculators sought to cash in on rising prices but sales volumes have fallen more recently.

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Damien Hirst burns his own art after selling NFTs

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The artist told buyers who bought pieces from his latest collection to choose either the physical artwork or the NFT representing it. Those who chose the NFTs were told their corresponding physical piece would be destroyed. Asked how he felt to be burning the works, Hirst said: "It feels good, better than I expected."

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A CNN video and article, reporting on the angry reaction from some artists that an AI-generated image has just been awarded first place in an art competition. 

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A CNN video and article, reporting on the angry reaction from some artists that an AI-generated image has just been awarded first place in an art competition. 

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UNPACKING THE ARTICLE What are students’ opinions on the work of art created by Jason M. Allen? What process did he go through to create it? Do you agree with Cal Duran, one of the judges, that it is a “beautiful piece” with “a lot involved”? Is this ‘real’ art? Overall, can AI truly make art, or can it only ever assist humans in making art?

KEY TERMS Digital art, Tool, Good art and bad art, Imagination, Generated by AI, Opportunities

LINKS TO The arts, Technology

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A BBC article, looking at the latest exhibition of the artist Bridget Riley, and the meaning, purpose, and methodology behind her art. 

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A BBC article, looking at the latest exhibition of the artist Bridget Riley, and the meaning, purpose, and methodology behind her art. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The story of Banksy’s ‘Love is in the Air’ work of art - and its self-destruction during auction - was sensational, and posed some big questions about the nature of art. Now the shredded version of the painting is on sale - and expected to make even more money than before. What does this tell us about how we value art? Does it matter whether an artist’s intention is ‘anti-establishment’ when the establishment has bought (literally) into their art? Is originality the most important characteristic of great art? Who owns art?

KEY TERMS Anti-establishment art, Art history

LINKS TO The arts

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Bridget Riley never ceases to amaze. Throughout her career, the visionary artist has continually challenged the ways we see and understand the world around us. Now, aged 90, she has no intention of stopping - and says she's still learning from the mistakes of her past.

In an exclusive interview with BBC Newsnight, Riley, who is one of the UK's most renowned artists, described herself as a sort of creative sociologist.

"I held a mirror up to human nature and reported faithfully," she tells Kirsty Wark.

Art has contributed to her own understanding of the world, too. Artists have "borne witness" to society's "changing circumstances and events, to horrors and as well as to wonder," she says.

And as one of the most significant artists of the 20th and 21st century, Riley says she hopes her work has made a contribution to "order, stability and the joy of living."

Born in London in 1931, Bridget Riley emerged onto the art scene in the 1960s with a series of abstract black and white geometric paintings.

Focusing on simple forms, such as lines, circles, curves and squares, Riley developed her own signature style - known as Op Art, or optical art - using optical illusions with the aim of actively engaging the viewer and disorientating them by triggering sensations of movement.

By the end of the 1960s, Riley introduced colour into her work and, in 1968, she became the first British contemporary artist and the first woman to win the Venice Biennale's International Prize for Painting.

Although Riley is often described as an abstract artist, she isn't comfortable with the term.

"I don't know what that is... I go along with it.

"I'm a painter first and foremost. I explore and I try and understand and try to find out what I can look at, what can be seen."

A fiercely private individual, Riley rarely gives interviews. But, discussing a career that has spanned six decades, Riley describes looking back at her previous work and making new discoveries.

"Sometimes they're entirely old friends. Other times, I see things in them which I didn't intend, didn't see, didn't hope for, or weren't apparent to me."

While retrospection is "tempting", Riley says, "with the time I have still, I want to make the most use of it and explore further some of the possibilities I see."

Riley's artistic journey began in Cornwall, where, during World War Two, her family sought refuge as her father was drafted into the Army.

She credits this period, and the time she spent with her aunt, Bertha Joyce, who had studied art, with laying the foundations of her artistic personality and exposing her to a new way of seeing.

"It was beautiful... There was in fact nothing to do but look and enjoy and appreciate and move around in this extraordinarily beautiful landscape."

Formative experiences in the countryside influenced and shaped her visual perceptions, which she describes as being like "swimming through a diamond."

Bathing in a shallow pool in Cornwall, Riley recalls a specific moment seeing the "colours of the seaweed and anemones and other little things in it and, at the same time, there was a reflection from the cliff above.

"The mixture of all colours that you could perceive laying one upon another in this way... generated an extraordinary after-image."

After the war, Riley enrolled in Goldsmiths College and at the Royal College of Art, where she developed her style and was influenced predominately by French post-impressionist painter Georges Seurat, who she attempted to copy in 1959.

Her copy of Seurat's Bridge at Courbevoie, which hangs in the Courtauld, was pivotal in Riley's understanding of colour, tone and repetition.

Beyond Seurat, Riley also sought inspiration from Cézanne, Mondrian, Matisse and Monet.

Building on Monet's Water Lily series, Riley attempted in the early 1960s to create an expansive, three-dimensional piece of work. But although Riley's aim was to draw the viewer in and create and immersive involvement, Continuum (1963), proved too "literal".

"I thought I would make a big painting, which enveloped you physically and that was a great mistake... So I went back to flat painting and engaging you on a paintings' proper condition, which is flat and open."

Although Riley describes that work as a mistake, it provided an invaluable lesson.

"As Matisse said, 'Don't get rid of your mistakes'. They are the things that will help you to get to move, and to think, and to understand a little bit more about what you're doing."

Education and exposure to the arts paved the way for Riley's successful career, and she is worried by the government's recent cuts to the arts. There is a need for "government support and private enterprise to take a hand" in providing "vital" spaces for young artists to start their career, she says.

"The art... can be everything from a safety valve to a very highly-developed expression of complex responses.

"It's not a question of money, it's a question of wanting to do something, or wanting to make an effort."

Now, the renowned nonagenarian artist is gearing up for her latest exhibition.

Past into Present, which will be shown at David Zwirner's London gallery, principally features work from the last two years, but also includes references to the work of the past, both in her own practice and in the art of painting itself.

The exhibition will feature works from Riley's current series Measure for Measure and Intervals.

Viewed together, these bodies of work underscore the consistency of Riley's decades-long investigation of colour and form and her relentless experimentation with perception.

The exhibition is, in turn, the leading show in the inaugural London Gallery weekend - when private galleries all over the capital can finally throw their doors open to the public.

The possibility of an interview with one of the UK's foremost and most important artists was tantalising.

Bridget Riley's work has, so far, spanned 70 years, which is, I think, longer than any other contemporary artist in these islands. Her work ethic is astonishing - she never seems to flag - and her interrogation and forward march of her own art, constant.

The occasion for the interview was to be the opening of her latest exhibition Past into Present at the David Zwirner Gallery in London on 3 June, and I was beyond keen to speak to her. For me she is a real Titan as an artist. Her paintings are both rigorous and sensuous and her hold on colour unsurpassed and exciting.

First stop was the gallery, on Monday, to look at the latest hang. Bridget had worked and reworked the hang and, over the weekend, she had made a change to the sequencing of her Measure for Measure series.

She takes the viewer through from one room to another, where new darker arrangements of discs in the paintings are both exhilarating and dynamic.

In her new version of her Interval series, which she painted during the pandemic, Bridget has injected a terrific infusion of turquoise as intense and alive as the sea.

Then it was off to morning coffee with the artist, and an hour long conversation ahead of our interview. I felt I had to be on my mettle, conscious that she had indicated she wanted to know why I like her paintings, but she greeted me with a huge smile, twinkling eyes, and a firm handshake; her grey hair framed around her face gamin-style, wearing a black t-shirt and black and grey trousers - looking every bit as cool as she has looked in photographs all the way from the 60s until now.

There followed a lively discussion about art, during which she proved to be a great educator and voracious reader about art and artists. Then, later in the morning, we met at a small, light-filled studio. When she arrived, she duly sat down in her bright white surroundings and our interview ranged over her influences, her move from black and white to other colours, her short unsuccessful foray into 3D, her childhood in Cornwall and the origins of her artistic sensibility, for which she gave her mother and aunt great credit, and the great joy she has watching children respond to her paintings.

Bridget Riley may be 90 but she is still an artist in her prime.

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Bridget Riley: 'I held a mirror up to human nature and reported faithfully'

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Bridget Riley never ceases to amaze. Throughout her career, the visionary artist has continually challenged the ways we see and understand the world around us. Now, aged 90, she has no intention of stopping - and says she's still learning from the mistakes of her past.