Hello, this is Everything Else, the Culture podcast from The Financial Times.

I'm John Sonia.

And I'm Grizalda Murray Brown.

On this week's episode, we'll be talking about art and culture in the age of Donald Trump.

And we will also be talking to the Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak.

She's the most widely read novelist in Turkey, and she told us that artists like her

do not have the luxury of being apolitical.

And we'll find out what it's like to have lunch with the man who invented card counting

and beat the dealers of Las Vegas.

Despair in the weeks following the election has now kind of turned into constructive rage.

So it feels like a time we almost have to talk about Trump and what it means for art and culture.

We weren't going to do it this week.

No, we had a completely different segment lined up up which we decided to scrap at the last moment but we felt we had to

do something this week the news cycle is almost on speed we don't know what's going on in the

world every day new things are being announced culture is trump that's what it's become

culture is trump and and so that begs the question, what is the space for culture? What should art do at a time like this?

There have been lots of recent examples of artists staging kind of their own little mini protests, some far more successfully than others.

Yeah. Recently the artist Christo, who is famous for wrapping things up, he did the Pondurf in Paris, the Reichstag building.

He was going to... What do you mean wrapping them up? I don't know the sky's work. He wraps them up, like you'd wrap up a Christmas present. He would wrap up the whole of the Reichstag. It was in this kind of billowing white fabric. That's it. He covers things. So he was going to do this with a portion of the Arkansas River in Colorado.

He was going to literally this with a portion of the Arkansas River in Colorado.

He was going to literally cover it with material. It's quite hard to describe these, but really you

should Google the images because they're really fantastic. This is obviously on federal land.

...