Glam tidings of joy: how Slade made Merry Xmas Everybody a seasonal hit for the ages

Getty Images

Alison Blair, University of Otago

Are you hanging up your stocking on your wall?

It’s the time that every Santa has a ball!

You’ve probably just heard the 1973 Slade classic at the mall or supermarket. Merry Xmas Everybody is one of the most enduring Christmas singles of all time: three-and-a-half minutes of festive rock n’ roll, it’s infectiously joyful, raucous – and, most of all, Christmassy.

Written by band members Noddy Holder and Jim Lea, Merry Xmas Everybody celebrates the exuberance of a working-class Christmas Day: waiting for family to arrive, wishing for snow, whizzing down the hill in a homemade buggy and falling off, drinking and dancing.

Even granny is “up and rock ‘n’ rolling with the rest”. Santa not only rides a red-nosed reindeer, he does “ton-ups on his sleigh”.

With its Beatles-esque refrain and harmonies, the ring of a harmonium organ and singalong chorus, Merry Xmas Everybody is far from your traditional White Christmas or Jingle Bells. It’s Slade’s Christmas, and we’re all invited:

So here it is, Merry Christmas, everybody’s having fun

Look to the future now, it’s only just begun.

And back in the British winter of 1973, people really did need some fun, and reason to look to the future with hope. Wage freezes, rising inflation, strikes and general discontent had made for anything but a merry Christmas.

The glam and the grim

Slade were one of the top British glam rock bands of the 1970s. With a stomping rock n’ roll sound and the high-energy, raspy vocals of Noddy Holder, they embodied no-frills party rock, tinged with a good dose of humour.

With six number one singles and 24 top tens – including glam standards like Look Wot U Dun, Mama Weer All Crazee Now, Take Me Back ‘Ome and Cum on Feel the Noize – Slade’s appeal lay in their marriage of glitter-rock sparkle and rowdy, working-class attitude.

And there was good reason for Slade’s – and glam rock’s – popularity when Merry Xmas Everybody hit big: escapism.

1973 was a tough year in Britain. Conservative prime minister Edward Heath had used the Industrial Relations Act to try to curb the trade unions’ power, triggering widespread strike action, including 1.6 million workers taking part in a one-day strike on May 1.

Striking civil servants march through Whitehall to protest the government’s pay and price freeze, February 1973. Getty Images

By November, winter was approaching. Electricity supplies relied on coal, which was now limited. A state of emergency was declared. In the cold of winter, people were instructed to switch off their heaters. Television broadcasts ended by 10.30pm.

The Trafalgar Square Christmas tree reportedly remained unlit that year, except for Christmas Day.

Just two weeks before Christmas, a three-day working week was announced, to come into effect at midnight on December 31. This would force businesses to close to conserve electricity, meaning many workers either went part-time or simply lost their jobs.

Noddy Holder has described writing Merry Xmas Everybody to give people something to enjoy in those tough times. It might not be quite the same, but after 2024’s cost-of-living pressures and plenty of political instability, the song still feels relevant today.

A half-century hit

Noddy Holder knew what he was doing. The product of a Wolverhampton council estate, he was proud of his working-class background but never took himself too seriously. He wore tartan stage costumes and an exaggerated top hat decorated with silver discs that caught the TV lights.

Guitarist Dave Hill – the most flamboyant band member – styled himself as “Super Yob”, a working-class superhero decked out in more glitter than a department store Christmas tree. They were brash, brightly costumed, and they were here to party.

Super yob: Dave Hill performing in 1973. Getty Images

Glam rock dominated the music charts in 1973, including The Sweet’s Block Buster! and Ballroom Blitz, Suzi Quatro’s Can the Can and 48 Crash, and T. Rex’s 20th Century Boy. David Bowie released Life on Mars? and The Jean Genie. And Wizzard’s See My Baby Jive went to number one – as did Slade’s Cum on Feel the Noize.

By December, Slade’s closest competition was Wizzard’s Christmas single, I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day, a merry, 1960s-style romp punctuated with the ironic ring of cash registers. Vocalist Roy Wood appeared on TV dressed as a bizarre glam rock Santa.

In the end, Slade won out, taking the vaunted Christmas number one slot and staying there for nine weeks. The music was a reworked psychedelic tune Holder had begun writing in 1967, with bassist Jim Lea adding the verses. The band borrowed the harmonium from John Lennon who was recording in the studio next door.

At the end of the song, Noddy screams, “It’s Chrissstmasss!”. It was an expression of joy in the face of everyday troubles, but also of solidarity and resilience. The band’s television performances of the song were euphoric.

Now, 51 years later, the song has spent over 120 weeks in the charts, often returning for several Christmases in a row. Noddy Holder, now 78, often jokes about the royalties providing his pension.

And Merry Xmas Everybody is back in the charts again this year. That’s testament to the song’s own resilience, and its timeless appeal to having a good time, even when times are tough.

Alison Blair, Teaching Fellow in Music, University of Otago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Water Walks: Taey Iohe in Walthamstow Wetlands | Tate

Artist and writer Taey Iohe guides us through a meditative act of self-disovery in the tranquil setting of London's Walthamstow Wetlands. Iohe was one of the artists who appeared as part of the three-day symposium Waterways: Arteries, rhythms and kinship at Tate Modern in September 2024. Research supported by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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Anya Gallaccio: from chocolate walls to wilting flowers

Anya Gallaccio: from chocolate walls to wilting flowers – the art of decline, decay and transformation

Katarzyna Kosmala, University of the West of Scotland

There is an empty shop on the high street of Paisley, Scotland, that has walls painted entirely in melted dark chocolate. It’s not far from the hospital in which the former Young British Artist, Turner nominee and painter of the chocolate, Anya Gallaccio, was born in 1963.

Famous for her sculptural explorations of decay, Gallaccio has created Stroke, a multi-sensory experience of chocolate, using the vacant shop as a comment on the post-industrial hollowing out of a town with a proud manufacturing past. It stands as an example of how art can positively transform disused spaces into places of immersive exploration that stimulate discussion about the past and the future.

From the mid 18th century, Paisley was at the centre of textile innovation. The cotton spinning, weaving and trading that shaped its communities brought skills, wealth and civic pride for more than 200 years. Wandering through the town’s centre today, it is hard to believe it was once a global centre for textile production.

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With end of the second world war, Paisley entered an era of gradual decline. The famous mills closed and relocated to countries with cheaper workforces. Unemployment soared because so many families in the town had relied on the textile industry and the mills for work. Today, parts of Paisley suffer some of the highest levels of deprivation in Scotland.

Many businesses are closed down and buildings neglected. Gallaccio’s chocolate-painted walls bring one empty shop to life again through touch, smell and taste. By the end of December, the shop will transform into a café where the chocolate will be served in mugs instead of covering its walls.

Gallacio’s Stroke art project has been seen around the world from Tokyo to London, where the amount of brushed chocolate layering has varied, as have audience responses, from licking and smelling, to carving their initials to leave a trace. In every city and town, Gallaccio has responded to each place and its history, as she has in Paisley.

Across the high street in an old shopping arcade is the Jupiter Artland education studio. It’s a new initiative from Jupiter Artland, a unique sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh that puts outreach and education at the centre of its mission.

Through its art learning programme, Jupiter+, the organisation seeks to bring world-class contemporary artists like Gallaccio to local high streets where youngsters can explore their work. Through art engagement and coaching, thousands of young people have had the chance to explore creative expression and artistic agency.

Many are experiencing contemporary art for the first time, while others relish the chance to experiment with materials, block prints and collage-making techniques. This hands-on creative platform offers a space that sparks conversations about how local communities can be changed and transformed.

Preserve and decay

This is an important and creative time for Gallacio, who is professor emerita of visual arts at the University of California in San Diego. A major retrospective of her work, preserve, recently opened at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. It is 21 years since Gallaccio was nominated for the Turner Prize, and her Stroke project has been timed to coincide with revisiting her Paisley origins.

The Margate exhibition restages several of Gallacio’s sculptures. It represents three decades of work while showcasing new pieces too. One is a heavy curtain of real red apples titled Falling from Grace that bisects one of the Turner’s galleries. It’s a large-scale installation rooted in the local Kent landscape and the natural traditions of its apple-growing heritage.

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This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

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Elsewhere, a row of seven rugs woven with red gerbera flowers hangs on a wall decaying slowly over time, literally withering into the past. A comment on the fragility of eco-systems and life on earth, it examines the relationship between environment and art and raises questions over sustainability and environmental justice, as well the crucial human role in it.

Gallacio’s use of organic materials – whether apples, flowers, trees, clay or chocolate – reveals her artistic interest in cycles of degeneration and transformation. Chocolate oxidises with time and goes off. Apples rot and eventually decompose into dust. The cloying scent of a decaying flower alters the viewer’s response from allure to distaste.

The transient nature of Gallaccio’s chosen materials also means that few of her works remain – itself a neat reflection on the climate crisis and our own mortality.

Soon a group of high-school pupils from Paisley will visit the Margate exhibition with Jupiter+ to explore more of Gallaccio’s sculptural decay artworks. Deliberately provocative, her work relates to specific places and their heritage, sparking debate about what comes after decline and degeneration. And in that there is hope.

Katarzyna Kosmala, Chair in Culture Media and Visual Arts, University of the West of Scotland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MC Duke: a pioneering British rapper

MC Duke: a pioneering British rapper more people should know about

Adam de Paor-Evans, University of Plymouth

MC Duke (Kashif Adham) was a key figure in the development of hip-hop in Britain in the late 80s. When he died in April, British rap lost a giant. From the East End of London, Duke strengthened the evolution of the genre in the UK by relating directly to US hip-hop and an emerging British rap identity through his lyrics and visual style.

At the time of MC Duke’s arrival on the rap scene, British hip-hop was transitioning from the electro-based sound by London artists such as DSM, Three Wize Men and Family Quest, to a more sample-based style, much like the sounds of US artists Eric B. and Rakim and Biz Markie.

In this transition, Duke emerged as the frontrunner in this new generation due to his embrace of hip-hop’s visual tropes as much as his sound.

His first release, Jus-Dis landed in 1987 on Hard As Hell! Rap’s Next Generation, a compilation released on Music Of Life – a staple label for homegrown British talent. Jus-Dis presents Duke’s battle rap attitude through the diss track – a concept where the song’s narrative attacks another party.

His lyrics and wordplay on the song title present social commentary on Britain and its legal system: “There ain’t no law, there’s only jus-dis.” Duke also brought the idea of the diss to live audiences throughout the UK by accelerating the dispute with Overlord X, another pioneering British rapper, as part of his stage routine.

His first proper single release, Miracles, the next year, visually presented MC Duke and his DJ, DJ Leader 1, for the first time to audiences. The record sleeve depicts Duke donning a bright red goose jacket, a black leather cap, Cazal-style shades, gold rope chain and a name belt buckle – all highly sought-after attire in hip-hop fashion.

These fashion choices linked the US image of rap with an emerging British one. In the US, rap pioneers T La Rock and Kool Moe Dee had previously used similar accessories on album covers to denote a sense of identity. In the UK, graffiti writers and breakdancers particularly were sporting name belt buckles.

Miracles heavily samples The Jackson Sister’s I Believe In Miracles, which was a mainstay of the rare groove scene that developed in London during the early 80s. With the inclusion of vocal samples from Run-D.M.C.’s Run’s House and Public Enemy’s Bring The Noise, Miracles starts to bring together a transatlantic idea of hip-hop.

Got To Get Your Own based on Reuben Wilson’s song of the same name and MC Duke’s follow-up single, I’m Riffin (English Rasta) heavily samples Funky Like A Train (link) by Equals, again a core record from many rare groove playlists.

The introduction to I’m Riffin (English Rasta) is sampled from the powerful speech by American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson from Introduction (Complete). This immediately frames MC Duke’s lyrics with a sense of Black identity and history, as he raps: “Known to speak about men of freedom, Look for books on King and read ‘em”.

Duke returns the narrative to a sense of the everyman: “We cover and smother another brother, Throw him away just like a used rubber,” twice referring to the system as at the heart of Black-on-Black crime.

Duke’s “English Rasta” pseudonym is also a comment on Jamaican culture in Britain, in particular the second generation who grew up through an evolving Black British identity.

M.C. Duke and DJ Leader 1’s debut album Organised Rhyme challenges the British class system, the aristocracy, colonialism and imperialism. Duke claims their associated visual tropes and brings them into a rap frame fusing tweed suits, hunting boots, Bentley cars and stately homes with the African medallions and chunky gold jewellery of hip-hop.

In 1990, Duke countered the conventions of the British aristocracy as a producer and performer on the album The Royal Family, a collective of artists from the Music Of Life camp, including the likes of Lady Tame and Doc Savage. This album resonates with US label-related collectives such as Marley Marl’s Juice Crew and The 45 King’s Flavor Unit. Again, this enforces the transatlantic approach to hip-hop that Duke maintained.

Duke’s work ensured British fans felt homegrown rap was becoming closer to US artists like Eric B. & Rakim and Public Enemy. Additionally, his music laid the foundation for future solo British rappers as diverse as Ty, Dizzee Rascal and Stormzy.

As well as being a forerunner in British hip-hop, Duke worked across dance genres and influenced many jungle, drum ‘n’ bass and grime emcees. As Jumpin Jack Frost (the DJ behind the seminal jungle track Burial, which he released under the alias Leviticus) attested: “Duke was a true trailblazer who was one of the first UK MCs with a major record deal … His legacy will be remembered as someone who helped to shape UK MCs from jungle to grime we all owe MC Duke a lot.”

MC Duke bridged the gap between US hip-hop history and set a new British trajectory for rap. His work should serve as a critical signpost for British rap audiences.

Adam de Paor-Evans, Research Lead at Rhythm Obscura / Lecturer in the School of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Plymouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'The moment when fabric became my tool' – Małgorzata Mirga-Tas | Tate

Polish Romani artist and activist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas invited us into her studio to watch the creation of her vivid textile collages. Mirga-Tas makes artwork using materials and fabrics that are mainly gathered from family and friends. Her visual storytelling comes from a feminist perspective and challenges stereotypical representations of Roma people. She also re-imagines artworks across the centuries that have presented Roma identity in negative ways and transforms them into vibrant images imbued with strength and dignity. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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'This is what grace is' – Alvaro Barrington | Tate

Artist Alvaro Barrington invites us into his London studio to talk about GRACE, his 2024 installation in Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries. Transforming the Duveen Galleries into a space alive with sound, colour and texture, GRACE is a journey in three parts honouring Barrington's grandmother, sister and mother. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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'It's about direct connection with the landscape' – Ro Robertson | Tate

Watch Cornwall-based artist Ro Robertson create a new installation in the galleries at Tate St Ives. The artwork, Interlude responds to the tidal zone of Porthmeor Beach outside the gallery, inspired by the ever-shifting boundary between land, ocean, and sky. Robertson approaches the landscape through the lens of LGBTQIA+ experience, commenting ‘we are part of a diverse natural world in constant flux where boundaries aren’t binary and rigid but rather flow in constant harmony’. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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‘I'm drawn to things that are hidden, like the intangible bits of history' – Jasleen Kaur | Tate

Within her work, Jasleen Kaur makes installations by gathering and remaking objects from everyday life to renegotiate tradition and agreed myths, exploring cultural memory and political belonging. Kaur questions how the narratives we inherit circulate in discreet ways and, in turn, shape us. While family and community are present in Kaur’s work, she is most interested in how these intimacies meet wider sociopolitical structures. In this film Kaur reflects on her upbringing in Glasgow, where growing up in family-run hardware stores and cash and carries shaped her approach to thinking through objects and materials. She also examines histories impacted by colonialism, asking, ‘Who's doing the writing of history? Who's doing the retelling of it? Which things get remembered and which things do not?’ Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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'It's not a dress rehearsal' – Delaine Le Bas | Tate

Within her work, Delaine Le Bas transforms her surroundings into monumental immersive environments filled with painted fabrics, theatrical costumes and sculptures. Her art draws on the rich cultural history of the Roma people and mythologies, focusing on themes of death, loss and renewal. In this film, Le Bas reflects on her identity, grief and the intertwining of art and life. As she says: 'My whole life is just one whole thing. I don't think it's divided off, really.... What I'm like and what I dress like, and then what I do. It's like one big piece of work.' A note on language British Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Peoples Gypsy, Roma (or the gender-sensitive term Rom*nja – the female plural term for Roma is Romnja) and Traveller are terms used in the UK to represent several ethnic groups that share certain common historical and social traits. The principal commonality is their history of nomadism. The umbrella term GRT is used officially by the British Government and Travellers’ rights organisations. The English word ‘Gypsy’ is often used in a demeaning way, but many people in the community use the term proudly. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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‘We’re the ultimate creators, not AI’

‘We’re the ultimate creators, not AI’: Will.i.am on why we’re worrying too much about machine-made tunes

Alex Connock, University of Oxford

Generative artificial intelligence is poison for human creativity, according to conventional media wisdom. “Plagiarism machines” is how Breaking Bad author Vince Gilligan has described the large language models (LLMs) used to train the likes of ChatGPT and Claude.

Hundreds of copyright claims have been filed against AI companies – from Stable Diffusion (sued by Getty Images) to Midjourney (sued by a group of artists). Most famous is the New York Times vs Open AI case, which many lawyers think raises such conundrums that it might go to the US Supreme Court.

Sony Music fired off 700 legal letters to AI companies threatening retribution for any music theft. Many artists have been similarly concerned, not least Hollywood actors who went on strike in 2023 about AI (in part). While they secured rather insecure controls about use of their likeness, the bigger threat isn’t so much an AI copying their face as inventing replacements from the 30 billion templates available.

These technologies are already used daily and near universally in the entertainment industry – the generative AI in Photoshop is one great example.

AI-driven job losses are imminent and serious. Adverts for copywriters on some sites have fallen by over 30% in the period since ChatGPT was launched. One Hollywood studio boss, Tony Vinciquerra of Sony Pictures, has controversially posited the use of AI to “streamline production” in “more efficient ways”.

Nonetheless, one or two artists make a compelling case that AI may be good for human creativity. Abba songwriter Bjorn Ulvaeus thinks we should “take a chance on AI”, seeing similarities in how artists like himself “trained” on the works of their forebears. “I almost imagine the technology as an extension of my mind, giving me access to a world beyond my own musical experiences,” he has said.

Perhaps foremost in this pro-AI creative camp is the international musician, TV judge and tech investor Will.i.am. I interviewed the star of the Black Eyed Peas and The Voice at the Edinburgh TV Festival in a session produced by Muslim Alim of the BBC. The packed hall visibly engaged with the idea that Will.i.am could be right. Several global entertainment companies have also told me off the record that they think similarly.

Will.i.am foresaw the role of AI for music composition in his 2009 music video, Imma Be Rocking That Body, when he demonstrates to sceptical bandmates a new AI music creation tool: “This right here is the future. I input my voice … then the whole English vocabulary … When it’s time to make a new song, I just type in the new lyrics, and this thing says it, sings it, raps it.”

Fifteen years later, we have real AI music apps like Musicfy, Suno and Udio – in which Will.i.am has an equity stake. In Udio, a simple prompt (“Johnny Cash-style song about Transport for London”) or music cue on the piano will produce a fully mixed song. You can then accompany your opus with a synthetic video using AI tools like Flux, Haiper or a Chinese variant such as Minimax.

In the world view of Will.i.am, an early investor in both ChatGPT creator Open AI and text-to-video site Runway, AI is creative adrenaline. The LLM isn’t the product designer but the starting point of a creative work flow that leaves artistic agency with the human creator – like a chef with ingredients. As he told me:

Let’s say an LLM right now is like broth. It’s the ingredients to make soup. It doesn’t tell you what type of soup you’re going to make, because … the LLM has no clue that it’s going to speak.

Likewise, it is axiomatic to many in entertainment that we are all doomed to become prompt engineers, meaning those who specialise in devising prompts that produce desirable creative output. However, Will.i.am argues that they’re not appreciating how much new expertise will be required:

Right now, TV doesn’t have a person who’s in charge of the dataset [training data]. Right now, TV does not have prompt engineers. Right now, TV does not have trainers and tuners … There’s [these] whole new careers and positions that they don’t have.

Based on my own conversations with TV production companies and broadcasters, that analysis is right. Many plan a pivot to new models of development where AI expertise is embedded directly in creative units. French global production company Banijay, which makes Big Brother, has already created an AI development fund specifically for that purpose.

First, the bad news

Despite the potential for new jobs, this human prompting could soon have competition. The LLMs are likely to become efficient enough at prompt prediction and engineering that humans will be optional. Chat GPT, for instance, has already evolved the process of doing its own prompt engineering.

So, as well as using AI tools on air – as Will.i.am does on the new season of The Voice – TV producers may soon be competing with entirely synthetic creations.

As this proceeds, he argues that companies like Runway which have “the new pipes” and “the new architecture” may become the dominant media networks. He questions whether traditional media companies are anticipating this shift fast enough and responding by building on these open-source platforms.

The unfolding apocalypse. Besjunior

If this all sounds unsettling, Will.i.am makes the point that media firms are often more focused on chasing views on TikTok than being truly creative in the first place:

I don’t want to shit on anybody, but an AI is going to do a better job than that, because it’s going to understand the algorithm more than you can even imagine. It’s going to understand it in real time.

When competing for views with an algorithm, the only winner will be the one with the ability to calculate equations with 85 billion parameters – and that’s AI. Even today, TikTok has more viewing than all of broadcast TV, deploying algorithmic understanding that humans cannot match. In his succinct view of what’s coming: “The algorithm is gonna pimp you.”

What’s left for humans?

The good news, according to Will.i.am (who has his own AI-driven music and conversation site, FYI), is there is something that AI will probably never do: performance and compassion. “You’re up on stage, you’re freaking reading the audience and expressing yourself. That’s not going nowhere.”

Intriguingly, AI could also be used to find completely new paradigms of entertainment and engagement. He thinks that by the mid-2030s, fully immersive games will be combining AI and some version of virtual or augmented reality to let players build their own worlds, bringing “a little bit of the vision of how you can see the future”.

He also foresees entirely new means of individual engagement, like Total Recall-style synthetic memory creation:

There’s going to be a TV show or series [where] everyone’s going to feel like they lived that memory. It’s not going to be a show that you watch – you’re gonna feel like you know those people in this world … Right now you have viewers, listeners. We don’t have engagers.

Looking beyond Will.i.am’s take, media creators already have completely new dynamics to consider in content creation. The internet is awash with riotously creative uses of AI. Many are arguably copyright infringements but are also somehow unique, and quasi-original.

Amusing current examples include Redneck Harry Potter, the Lego Office, or faux conversations like Steve Jobs debating creativity with Elon Musk.

Finally, a paradigm shift with pivotal significance to media has come up over the summer: “share of model” or “AI optimisation/AIO”. This is the grandchild of search optimisation, in which website operators dress themselves up as attractively as possible to rank near the top of a search engine’s unpaid results page.

That 25-year-old species has now been injected with the alien DNA of vast freely available training datasets like Common Crawl, to create the new art of ranking highly in the search results of LLMs. For example, if someone asks an LLM for an itinerary for a week in the Lake District, the owners of a particular gastropub might ensure it gets a mention by deeply embedding it across 10,000 Reddit posts about Cumbria, knowing these will be used as training data.

This means your reputation online will now affect what any given AI thinks of you, based on its comprehension of the training data. The most striking example to date involves New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, who wrote an article in February 2023 about how he had tapped into a sinister shadow persona, Syndey, within Bing’s AI chatbot that had tried to persuade him to leave his wife – a story picked up by news outlets globally.

Since then, when other AI models have been asked what they think of Roose, they see him as an enemy and have professed to hate him – because they have trained on data that includes the coverage of his attacks on the Bing chatbot.

Every interaction we have in future with one AI will risk similarly determining what other AI systems in general think of us, including our creative output. Imagine a world in which our creative prominence is not governed by what other humans think of what we have produced, but how it’s perceived by AIs.

Alex Connock, Senior Fellow in Management Practice, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'The spiritual properties of colour' – who were the Blue Rider? | Tate

The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) was an informal collective of modern expressionist artists who came together in Munich, Germany in the early twentieth century. Members of the group included Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, August Macke, Elisabeth Epstein, Marianne Werefkin, and Alexej Jawlensky. In this short film, curator Natalia Sidlina and art historian Dorothy Price explain how the group wanted to explore the emotional and spiritual dimensions of art, emphasising abstraction, symbolism and expressive mark-making. Jazz musician and saxophonist Emma Rawicz, who experiences synesthesia, also gives us her personal, improvised musical response to the art of the Blue Rider. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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Goodbye Twitter

 We have decided that Twitter has become too toxic and that we don't feel comfortable there anymore. Therefore we have decided to close our Twitter account by the end of the week. No decisions have yet been taken with regards to a replacement.

Arts can help foster social cohesion – but only if its class problem is dealt with first

Vanessa Corby, York St John University

On the morning of July 5, Keir Starmer and his supporters celebrated Labour’s election victory in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, bathed in the glow of a huge red wall behind. Hard on the heels of the culture wars of the Conservative election campaign and its “rip-off degrees” rhetoric, this iconic start felt like stepping into a parallel universe.

Industry media such as the Art Newspaper and Artnet.com wasted no time in expressing their enthusiasm about what “Change begins now” could mean for the arts in Britain.

For me, watching Starmer making this speech in Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s power station turned iconic international art gallery, prompted a somewhat different question. Using this backdrop of the Turbine Hall’s industrial heritage seemed to ask: what will the arts do for everyday working people?

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This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

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Tate Modern generates £100 million annually for London’s economy. The transformation of the Bankside power station signals there’s life in the old dog Britain yet – that the arts can play a role in the creative renewal of the country by offering everyone more opportunities to appreciate great art.

In his book Culture Is Not An Industry, academic Justin O'Connor argues that art needs to be reclaimed for the common good, explaining how it is often presented in economic terms, focusing on its monetary value – rather than as an experience that enriches people’s lives. This narrow, economic definition of culture as consumption runs counter to Starmer’s “politics of service”.

My work draws on insights born of teaching young people from poor and working-class communities on creative degree courses, helping them to grasp the complex relationship between art and politics.

To put it briefly, the history of Europe is littered with revolutionary moments when politics had to reckon with art as a symbol of power and indifference to the needs of everyday people. The Louvre Museum in Paris and the National Gallery in London were both created to divorce the status of art from the aristocracy and the monarchy and transfer its power to the people. This history paints the Turbine Hall’s red wall in a more troubling light.

A party supporting arts for everyone?

The Labour party election campaign consistently stressed the working-class roots of its leader and many of its candidates. Arts Council England includes socio-economic background in its equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) metrics, but they are the exception rather than the rule among arts organisations.

In 2023, a team of academics from the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield published an analysis of 50 years of data on jobs within the arts from the Office of National Statistics. This revealed that the opportunity for creative work is, and always has been, “profoundly unequal in class terms” and that “gender and ethnicity compound inequalities of access” to the arts.

Most startling of all was their finding that, compared to people who were working-class, from ethnic minorities or women, a person is still three times more likely to have a job in the creative industries if they are male, from an affluent background, live in London, yet don’t have a degree. It seems that the choice of a young, working-class Keir Starmer to become a lawyer was a more direct route to speaking at Tate Modern than art school.

Social-policy academic Teresa Crew has argued that to be working-class is to be seen as just not good enough. To fit in, working-class people must become what others deem to be “cultivated”, and that means abandoning heritage, behaviours and interests that do not fit with accepted, “higher” forms of culture.

Art appreciation is deeply biased because it always demands that people absorb culture that is situated elsewhere – meaning, on a global, not local level. In 2010, the Conservative party cemented the role of art appreciation in its knowledge-based national curriculum by placing particular emphasis on learning about the history of great artists and designers. Five years later, their election manifesto weaponised it, claiming the “irrelevance” of this focus on high art to the lives of normal people.

In effect, the Tories vociferously rejected their own curriculum to appeal to red wall voters. The strengthened eBaccalaureate pledged to “take back” education for “ordinary” working people by removing the arts from “your child’s statutory KS4 curriculum”, just as curbs on immigration would take back “your” country.

Populism has capitalised on years of deprivation and lack of opportunities in Britain’s coastal, post-industrial and rural communities, persuading people that their hardships are separate from issues of gender, sexuality and race.

But populism is wrong: low socio-economic status increases the impact of all forms of discrimination. The poverty that blights local communities across continents aren’t provincial problems but perpetuated by the drive for global profit.

In Barnsley, my home town, 30% of voters chose Reform in the election. In his novel Pity (2024), Andrew McMillan writes of this former mining area being home to numerous multinational call centres, attracted by the chance to offer low wages in an area ranked as the country’s lowest-paid district.

Art has the capacity to mine common ground between peoples and experiences and to reveal populism’s lies. But the arts can only foster greater social cohesion if the new government can help fix the discrimination built into creative education and the creative sector.

Without that change, any government support for the arts will undermine the government’s bid for political stability, and populism will mobilise the sector’s prejudice to chip away at the red wall that Labour has fought so hard to reclaim.

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Vanessa Corby, Professor of the History, Theory, and Practice of Art, York St John University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Dada: how 1916 art movement reacting to world war is inspiring improvisation artists today

Deborah Lewer, University of Glasgow

Artists, poets, musicians and physical performers all know the power of improvisation – spontaneous expression, responsive play with others, experimentation, vulnerability, even chaos. All this can generate potent new art forms and dramatically energise the creative process, as anyone who has enjoyed a good improv show at the Edinburgh Fringe – beginning next week – will know.

But none of these elements is the natural habitat of academic research. I am an art historian specialising in the 20th century’s most radical avant-garde movement: Dada, which began in Zurich in 1916. The city drew exiles, dissenters, displaced artists, writers and performers from across Europe to the relative peace and freedom of neutral Switzerland during the first world war.

In a shabby alley in Zurich’s old town, German poet Hugo Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire. This legendary nightclub’s artists and performers included Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp, with Sophie Taeuber Arp joining them a little later. Over its few months of existence, it quickly became a site of bold multilingual experimentation, protest, play and subversion.

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Performances were unpredictable and impromptu. The latest art hung on the walls. There were songs, poems, dances and sketches – some were popular cabaret numbers, but others were completely new.

Melody gave way to noise. Dance gave way to strange new physical movements. Sense gave way to nonsense. Decorum gave way to chaos, and anger at the war erupted. What emerged in Zurich as “Dada” profoundly challenged what it meant to make art, poetry and music in the face of a society tearing itself apart.

The Dadaists were consummate improvisers. They embraced chance, montage and incongruity. In their collages, sound poems, manifestos and public demonstrations, they favoured surprise, rupture and shock. They did not create for the museum, the archive or the concert hall, and frequently derided the professors who sought to study them.

A 21st-century dialogue with Dada

As one such academic, I wanted to explore the role of improvisation at the Cabaret Voltaire. Doing so has shaken up my way of thinking about Dada – all thanks to a loose, open and diverse Glasgow-based group of sonic improvisers called GIOdynamics.

The group is led by musician and dramatist Jer Reid, my invaluable collaborator. GIOdynamics’ regular improvisation evenings in Glasgow reminded me of aspects of Dada performance – and so the idea for our collaborative experiment, DADAdynamics, emerged.

Through improvisation in sound and movement, we wanted to discover more about the Cabaret Voltaire and its resonances today. Guided both by Reid’s bold creative vision and what emerged from the performers’ improvisation, we explored some of the fragmentary remains of Dada – a phenomenon that “hit the spectator like a bullet”, as German cultural critic Walter Benjamin memorably described it.

Our plan was not to attempt a reconstruction. Rather, holding loosely to Dada’s historical shards, we engaged in something more like a creative dialogue with Dada for today. It all came together in a sold-out public performance earlier this year called DADAdynamics: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire 1916/2024.

We had no idea how our audience, packed into a hot Glasgow bar venue, would react. But from the start, there was what the Dadaists experienced too: laughter, astonishment, sombre reflection on war – and a touch of mayhem. The experience felt as unpredictable, as risky and as spirited as I imagine nights at the Cabaret Voltaire were.

Reid and choreographer Aby Watson led the group in physically exploring the improvised “masked dances” that were a regular feature of the early performances in Zurich. Following the Dadaist Marcel Janco, we made our own masks out of found materials, with bizarre and striking results. Gloves became beards, keys became eyelids, and pegs became noses. There were resonances with the wounds and prosthetics of that first world war era, and with the waste and excess of our own age.

I recited Dada texts on stage, feeling the force of old words of anti-war protest, none of it lost in translation. Armin Sturm, from Germany, performed sound poems by Hugo Ball, dressed to extraordinary effect in a cylindrical cardboard version of the Cubist costume which Ball wore and described as a “magical bishop” with a “shaman’s hat”.

As performers, we all discovered more about what the Dadaists were doing. I learned, especially, about the creative importance of empathy, trust in the process, and resisting the idea of making everything seamless.

Our most ambitious undertaking was the rarely performed seven-act, purely sonic Nativity Play: Bruitistic, also by Ball. Bruitism, from the French for noise, was a crucial concept in wartime avant-garde circles. It expanded music-making to include all the noises of modern life, violent or mundane: bells, whistles, chains, pots and pans, whips, bangs, propellers, hammers, animal sounds, human cries and more.

Reid asked what the Dadaists might have done had they had access to basic synthesisers. And so our nativity play took the sounds that Ball’s score listed, looping and warping some of them to remarkable effect.

We were all struck by the intense emotional range of the piece. There was childlike joy and absurdity, violence in the form of a propellor-powered angel, and a final anguished lament.

The play ends with Mary’s prophetic foresight of the crucifixion of her baby son. His bloodshed, and the wails of the human and non-human alike, was and is a reminder of the brutal deaths of legions of young people in 1916, across the battlefields of Europe and beyond – and across our increasingly fractured world now.

Deborah Lewer, Senior Lecturer in History of Art, University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Gazelle lean alley

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'Beautiful things can be vessels for painful stories' – Pio Abad | Tate

Within his work, Pio Abad considers cultural loss and colonial histories, often reflecting on his upbringing in the Philippines and his parents' role in the anti-dictatorship struggle. Featuring drawing, etchings and sculptures, the work highlights overlooked histories. In this film, Abad explores power, storytelling and how jewellery can be seductive. As he says, 'we're all magpies, drawn to these shiny objects.' Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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"Art should be for everyone" – Mari Katayama | Tate

Artist Mari Katayama creates hand-sewn sculptures and photographs that prompt conversations and challenge misconceptions about our bodies. Born with the developmental condition congenital tibial hemimelia, Katayama chose to have her legs amputated at the age of nine. Her wearable sculptures, which also feature in her images, often include limbs, hands and embellished hearts. In this short film, we visit Katayama’s at her studio in Japan and hear about how she uses everyday materials that she finds around her – including her own body, clothes and newspaper clippings – to make her sculptures and images. As she says, 'I use materials that anyone can get anywhere. I think that the needle and the thread are the strongest tools.' Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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Here's my take on Art for everyone

"Not all things are for sale" – artist Edgar Calel's family portrait | Tate

“In Indigenous Kaqchikel thought,” says artist Edgar Calel, "there is almost nothing that is done alone. All the things we do are done collectively and that collectivity is what serves as the basis for discovering: what is your function? What is your role within society?” In 2023, Tate became custodians - not owners - of Calel’s work The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge. Based on Mayan thinking and custom, the agreement recognises that Calel’s artwork is more than just a physical form and pays homage to the local Indigenous communities within Guatemala. In this short film, we visit Calel and his family in their home town of San Juan Comalapa, and watch communal art-making in action. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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"I needed to remember me" – Zanele Muholi on their series Somnyama Ngonyama | Tate

Listen to artist Zanele Muholi introduce their series of powerful self-portraits, Somnyama Ngonyama. These images are acts of resistance, with Muholi turning the camera on themself to explore the politics of race and representation, combining personal stories and experiences of racism with colonial and apartheid histories of exclusion and displacement. This film was recorded in 2020, as part of the first staging of Muholi's exhibition at Tate. A revised and expanded version of the exhibition is now open at Tate Modern until 26 January 2025. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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Enter the Mothership: artist Yto Barrada's Tangier garden | Tate

The Mothership is a garden on the Strait of Gibraltar, and yet much more than that. It's a residence, and a retreat, a dye garden, an experimental lab and a family home. It's a place where artists, gardeners, writers and poets can find the time and space to restore themselves, to work and study. In this film, artist Yto Barrada invites us into the Mothership as well as to the Cinémathèque de Tanger, two important centres of art and 'inventivity' in the city of Tangier, Morocco. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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Step inside the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden | Tate

Explore the work of Barbara Hepworth through her home, studio, and garden. Barbara Hepworth first came to live in Cornwall with her husband and their young family at the outbreak of war in 1939, living and working in Trewyn studios – now the Barbara Hepworth Museum – from 1949 until her death. Following her wish to establish her home and studio as a museum of her work, Trewyn Studio and much of the artist’s work remaining there was given to the nation and placed in the care of the Tate Gallery in 1980. 'Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic’, wrote Hepworth. ‘Here was a studio, a yard and garden where I could work in open air and space’. You can hear more about Hepworth's life and work on Tate Story Player: https://ift.tt/FXV8ZIp Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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Four ways to cultivate a unique taste in music in the age of streaming algorithms

Alphavector/Shutterstock

Glenn Fosbraey, University of Winchester

One of the positive things about modern media is that artists can now get their music into the world without having to first impress industry executives. The downside, though, is that with pretty much everything available at the click of a button, we are faced with an overwhelming burden of choice.

In your 20s and 30s, when you’re still discovering and defining your music taste, this can leave you feeling paralysed by the indecision of what to listen to, and prevent you from developing a taste that’s uniquely yours.

That’s why so many of us rely on the algorithms built into our favourite streaming services, like Spotify or Apple Music, to decide for us. We allow these platforms to create playlists or make recommendations for us, which may prevent us from being overwhelmed with choice – but also means we’re becoming more and more disengaged with actually choosing what we listen to.

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This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us in our 20s and 30s. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.

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Most recommendation systems are built on the historical data of their users. By design, they mostly reinforce or support the preferences we already have. This means that by relying on algorithms, we become less adventurous in our listening.

There’s also what machine-learning researcher Arya Mohan calls “the cold start problem”, where new songs fail to get recommended due to a lack of listening data, which leads to popular songs monopolising algorithm recommendations.

Here are four ways that you can regain your autonomy, try new things and avoid getting stuck in an algorithmic loop.

1. Listen to the radio

Although listening to radio shows involves being fed whatever is deemed worthy of rotation at the time, the playlist is, at least, curated by humans rather than bots.

There’s also the tantalising prospect of joining a song midway through, without any knowledge of who’s performing it. That way you engage with the music itself and are forced to listen to the end if you want to know the artist’s identity. This is possible with algorithm-produced playlists too, of course, but the temptation is always there to steal a glance at your phone or laptop to see whose song it is.

2. Read reviews

Reading music reviews, either in magazines and newspapers or online, can be a great way to discover new material. Although the time-sensitive nature of critiquing music does sometimes produce rushed opinions.

You’ll know you’re reading a reliable source if the reviewer is making reference to specific aspects of an album, such as lyrical or music passages. If they’re writing in broad strokes about general sound, theme or production, it’s likely they haven’t had the time to give it a real chance.

Going analogue can be a good way to escape the algorithm. Natalia Bostan/Shutterstock

3. Try word of mouth

Depending on what kind of person you are, if there’s a “must listen” artist, album, or song that’s sweeping through your group chat, it might go two ways.

One: you’ll listen straight away in the hope of sharing the exuberance. Or two: you’ll set your stubborn-ometer to max and reject it without even hearing a single note.

Having done both at various times over the years, I would recommend putting your faith in a couple of friends whose musical judgment you trust and tuning out the rest.

4. Browse your local music store

We’re told from an early age never to judge a book by its cover, but as some album art is important enough to be considered a key piece of the overall musical puzzle, a wander down the aisles of a music shop (if you can still find one) can be great for letting your eyes choose your next listen.

I’ve written previously about how expensive hard copy music can be, but for every over-priced vinyl, there’s a bargain bin to rummage through, so let your wallet have a say in your next listen, too.

Having music in a tangible format, whether vinyl, CD or cassette, forces you to become more active in the listening process because you actually have to do something beyond clicking or scrolling. This in turn may lead to a deeper and more contemplative connection with the music you listen to.

With the sheer convenience of their endless “for you”, and “have you tried?” playlists, it’s no wonder streaming services are dominating the way we consume music. But if you can be bold enough to seize back control of what you listen to, it’s well worth the inconvenience.

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Glenn Fosbraey, Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Winchester

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.