Welcome to Everything Else, the FT Culture Podcast. This is our season finale. I'm Griselda, and today we're discussing the idea of American Cool. Where did it come from? What does it look like? And is it over? I'll be joined by the writer and academic Sarah Churchill and the arts journalist Peter Aspden.

And after that, I'll speak to the experimental theatre director Simon McBurney, who show The Encounter, returns to the Barbican in London in April.

You look cool, Gris. Thanks, Chica. So do you. But what do we mean when we say that something

looks cool? It's about a kind of effortless style, a restraint, a nonchalance, a je ne se quo.

Is it about counterculture, rebellion? It's meant lots of different things over the course of

the 20th century and today. And it's kind of a slippery term. Even the word cool itself, I think,

has lost its cool to some extent. I mean, it's a difficult thing to define. One early definition, the Ashmolean

Museum in Oxford is kind of grappling with in an exhibition that's just opened that I saw a few

days ago called America's Cool Modernism. And cool in this sense is all about restraint,

about detachment, about sort of taking the emotion out of scenes. It's American art from

the interwar years, so the 1920s, the 1930s, and lots of artists whose names we don't know in this

country, many of them were completely new to me. Their work is not in our public museums. It's not

often seen here. Many of these

pictures have never left America before. Edward Hopper is really the only well-known name and the

sort of recognisable style that we see in the show. And the kind of pictures that he paints,

so kind of empty streets, at night often, lamplight, isolated figures in cafes,

looking kind of melancholic slightly or just sort of pensive, thoughtful.

That's the sort of aesthetic that permeates this exhibition.

It's eerie, it's isolated, it's factories, bridges, railroads, these symbols of modernity,

but also the countryside as well. So there's barns and silos.

Artists were trying to define, I think, what it meant to be American at this period,

at this time when America was a young country. So they're grappling

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