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, it's 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 at some level of genius. It also helps

that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream

van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, a hundred years ago, a new art form seemed to quite suddenly spring into being abstraction.

And while it shocked and surprised at the time, its radical visual ideas and innovative risks still shape the world we inhabit.

They decorate our public and private spaces, shape many of our buildings,

and they've encouraged us to see reality differently. With me here at Tate Modern to figure out

abstract art are the artist, critic and broadcaster Matthew Collings. We've seen him recently

presenting the rules of abstraction for BBC television, the poet Paul Farley, who studied and

has written about art, including

delving into Tate Liverpool's archive. Susan Greenfield is a neuroscientist and senior research

fellow at Lincoln College Oxford. She's interested in how brains form connections and assign

meanings, and she's also written and broadcast on the impact of new technology on users' brains.

And Fiona Ray is one of Britain's leading abstract artists. She gained prominence in the 1990s

as one of the young British artists and she was appointed Professor of Painting for the Royal Academy

Schools in 2011. She's currently exhibiting in Southampton and will shortly be showing new work in Berlin. Well,

welcome to you all and let's begin with an image that many regard as the most famous abstract

painting of them all. It's up here behind us, Kazimir Milievich's Black Square, the most expensive

backdrop I've ever worked with. If you're listening, do go to the web page where you can see it too.

Now, I'd like to start by asking all of you to explain what you see when you look at it and why that

might be. Susan is our scientist. As a scientist, I can give the most literal interpretation,

and for those who are not going to the web, I can actually see two things. I can

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