Free Thinking - Must The Arts Be Relevant?
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2015
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matthew Sweet chairs the British Academy of Song Writers, Composers and Authors debate about relevance and the contemporary across art forms. He is joined by Mark Baldwin Artistic Director of Rambert Dance Company, Catherine Wood curator at Tate, Jennifer Walshe composer and vocalist, Vayu Naidu storyteller and Sarah Kent art critic and performer.
Recorded in front of an audience at the studios of Rambert on London's South Bank.
Part of BBC Radio 3's coverage of the BASCA awards which you can hear broadcast on Saturday's Hear and Now.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 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 | Things aren't looking good at the moment. |
| 0:34.1 | The polar ice caps are melting. |
| 0:36.0 | We're worried about terrorism, about the housing shortage, |
| 0:39.1 | about Syria, about all that salt and fat in our diets. I was in a train carriage yesterday |
| 0:44.5 | in which two separate people were sitting and crying. Now, what, if anything, is art supposed |
| 0:50.4 | to do about that? Should it consolers offer us an escape, or should it make us feel more |
| 0:56.1 | acutely aware of our own dissatisfactions, in order, perhaps, that we might do something about them? |
| 1:02.6 | No art can escape its historical moment. You only have to look at Julie Christie's makeup in the |
| 1:07.8 | 1966 version of Far From the Madding crowd to see that. But does it have a duty |
| 1:12.7 | to engage with it self-consciously, to be in a word that may put shivers down the spine or send |
| 1:18.9 | the heart leaping relevant? This special edition of free thinking comes from the stage of Rombert |
| 1:24.8 | in its shiny new HQ on the South Bank of the Thames, |
| 1:28.1 | a site associated with the future and with the contemporary since 1951, |
| 1:32.8 | when the Festival of Britain pitched its skylon here. |
| 1:35.7 | On Saturday, Radio 3's Here and Now will be reporting on this year's British Composer Awards |
| 1:41.0 | from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. So we'll be trying to |
| 1:45.5 | think particularly hard about the relevance or irrelevance of contemporary music. Here on the boards |
| 1:51.0 | before us are the artistic director of Rombair, Mark Baldwin, the art critic Sarah Kent, the novelist |
| 1:56.8 | and storyteller Vionaidu, the composer Jennifer Walsh, and Catherine Wood, who's curator at Tate Modern, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.