The team that brought you the ‘truly unique’ (Independent) internationally renowned art festival Crunch are back with a host of punchy debates, spine-tingling live music, films, comedy and art for HowTheLightGetsIn 2013. Everything you think you know is wrong: Love was invented by poets. Science is more terrifying than art. Reality is fantasy. The Institute of Art and Ideas is determined to change the way we think about art. Join us for ten days of mind-bending debates with some of the world’s leading cultural icons including novelists AS Byatt, Terry Pratchett, Nick Harkaway and Jim Crace, BAFTA award winning director Stephen Frears, poet Don Paterson, BBC Radio 3’s Katie Derham, sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp, Sundance award-winning filmmaker Sally El Hosaini, and leading art historian Griselda Pollock.
Highlights include:
The Art of Life
From Thomas Cromwell to Abraham Lincoln, the legacies of historical icons are controlled by the writers and historians who shape their reputations. Yet since Foucault declared that history itself was a fiction, the very notion of historical truth has been in doubt. Is it an error to believe that authentic accounts of human lives are possible, and if so, what responsibilities are left to those who speak for the dead? BAFTA-winning director of High Fidelity and The Queen Stephen Frears and biographers Hermione Lee and Ray Monk contemplate the limits of life writing.
At the World's Edge
Fantasy tales are often seen as a peripheral part of culture, with little to contribute to our lives other than throw-away entertainment. Is this an error? Might fantasies be central to how we perceive the world, and even gesture towards the limits of our understanding? Mary Ann Sieghart asks philosopher Terry Eagleton and eminent novelists AS Byatt and Terry Pratchett to explore reality’s edge.
The New Beautiful
Sidsel Christensen, Griselda Pollock, Julian Stallabrass. Juliet Gardiner chairs. From Laurie Anderson to Damien Hirst, a generation of artists banished beauty in favour of the grotesque, the discordant and the weird. But was this an error? Are new forms of aesthetic delight on the rise, and if so, what will the consequences be for our culture? Courtauld scholar and High Art Lite author Julian Stallabrass, eminent art historian Griselda Pollock and Norwegian artist Sidsel Christensen contemplate the new beautiful.
For more information, visit: www.howthelightgetsin.org
The full arts programme can be found at: howthelightgetsin.org/2013-programme/eventtickets/art-literature-film/
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