Free Thinking - Bhupen Khakhar. The City State of London? Saskia Sassen, Jane Morris, David Anderson and Pat Kane.
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2016
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Philip Dodd is joined by art historian Devika Singh to consider the art of Bhupen Khakhar and the subjects he explored including class difference; desire and homosexuality; and his personal battle with cancer.
Also, Saskia Sassen, Jane Morris, David Anderson and Pat Kane discuss the emergence of London as a global city and what the economic and cultural ramifications might be for the rest of the UK.
Bhupen Khakhar is on show at Tate Modern from June 1st to September 6th.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | On tonight's program is London, rich, global, attention and talent grabbing, |
| 0:38.3 | also throttling the cultural life out of the rest of the country. |
| 0:42.3 | As Tate Modern Reddies itself to open its new £260 million extension, |
| 0:48.3 | we ask if the rise of the global city like London is at the expense of the rest of the country. London grows culturally |
| 0:55.8 | more powerful, the weak, the rest weaker. We have just the right cast and there'll be in action |
| 1:01.4 | soon. But first, a man who actually left a great metropolitan city to move to a provincial one |
| 1:07.7 | in the 1960s. It was in Baroda, India that the Bombay-born Bopin-Kaka learned to be an artist. |
| 1:14.4 | His one-person exhibition, You Cannot Please All, opens at Tate Modern this week |
| 1:19.4 | and takes us from his early paintings of urban middle-class life |
| 1:23.2 | through his urban dreamscapes to the later work, |
| 1:26.5 | which both revels in the pleasures of the body. |
| 1:29.6 | There are paintings of gay love and desire, and also in its pains, |
| 1:33.9 | paintings made out of his battle with cancer. |
| 1:37.2 | Pre-Renaissance Sienese art, Indian miniatures, pop art, shades of Henri Russo, the Naif, |
| 1:43.1 | all these are mixed together to make paintings |
| 1:45.3 | that are unmistakably a form of narrative and figurative art. |
| 1:50.3 | It's not surprising that one of the works is loaned |
| 1:53.1 | belongs to Salman Rushdie. |
| 1:55.7 | De Vika Singh, one of the contributors to the Tate's catalogue, |
... |
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