How To Make A Modernist Masterpiece

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A "house on chicken legs” in Moscow designed by Viktor Andreyev, Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room first published on 26 October 1922, Coal Cart Blues sung by Louis Armstrong drawing on his own experiences of pulling one round the streets of New Orleans where he started his teenage years living in a Home for Waifs; Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 are picked out as novelist Will Self, art historian and literary critic Alexandra Harris, jazz and music expert Kevin Le Gendre and architecture writer Owen Hatherley try to nail down the elements that make something modernist; looking at the importance of rhythm, the depiction of everyday life and new inventions, psychology and how you describe the self and utopian ideas about communal living. The presenter is New Generation Thinker and essayist Laurence Scott.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Image: Will Self in BBC Broadcasting House, London

Part of the modernism season running across BBC Radio 3 and 4 with programmes marking the publication in 1922 of Ulysses by James Joyce, a reading of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, a Words and Music playlist of readings from key works published in 1922 and a Sunday Feature on Radio 3 looking at the "all in a day" artwork.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can I just say?
0:01.5	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast.
0:04.0	It's such a wonderful listen.
0:05.6	So nice.
0:06.5	There are loads more like it on BBC sounds.
0:08.8	Different paces, different heights.
0:10.6	The roof is buckling.
0:11.9	Where you can also listen to live sports commentary.
0:14.2	It's right foot goes for goal.
0:16.7	And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories.
0:21.7	The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession.
0:25.2	And she's had to live with that.
0:26.8	So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion.
0:29.7	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.8	Sort of expecting that every week now.
0:34.7	Thanks for downloading the Arts and Ideas podcast.
0:37.3	I'm Lauren Scott. On today's program, I'm going
0:39.8	to tell you how to make your own modernist masterpiece in several easy steps. Fame and
0:45.0	acclaim are mere moments away. Join me after this. Hello, my name's Ian McMillan. And before you
0:50.9	slide into the podcast you were expecting, let me tell you a little bit about my program The Verbe, Radio 3's Literary Festival, Language Cafe, and Journey to the Centre of the Sentence. We'll hear new poems and stories, specially commissioned for the show, and we'll ask the kinds of questions that writers really like to be asked, like, do you use a pen or a pencil? No, I promise, we won't ask that one. I use a pen,
1:13.1	by the way. Subscribe to the verb on BBC Sounds. I wrote that with a pen.
1:19.2	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Burn the museums, kill the street, make it new.
	...

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