High culture is easy to hate with a passion. Keats wrote ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’! That’s basically ‘Poem to a Pot’. The language may be beautiful, but he is gazing for hours, misty-eyed, at what is, at best, a fairly pleasant piece of ceramics. I wanted to write on low culture. Think Bridget Jones, with Colin Firth stumbling over his cut-glass consonants, spilling clipped RP all over Bridget’s Christmas jumper. Eddie Redmayne’s pallid sad-face scoring the lead role in the Harry Potter spin-off , Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Preternaturally nasal-voiced Milky Bar Kid Owen Wilson yet again playing the loveable doofus. Benedict Cumberbatch being the next in a long line of British actors to rub themselves over the Marvel franchise, purring about how rich they are going to be. Michael Fassbender swanning about somewhere, shoving award nominations in the pocket of his 10-to-the-dozen grey sharp suit. James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe patting each other on the back about the new Frankenstein film and sparking yet another wave of ‘celebrity bromance’ journalism. One of the Hemsworth brothers wearing a period costume somewhere sunny and raking in £12 billion at the box office. I could go on…but are you even noticing what links them all?

Here is something that needs to be said about the drudgery of culture. White straight cis middle-class male actors are boring. They are not evil, or wrong, or even bad at acting – in fact, I suspect a lot of them were manufactured in a lab especially to perform a Really-Quite-Original-And-Modern Hamlet at the RSC, four stars, The Telegraph. The whole concept is just a little overdone, like The X Factor or ‘quirky’ girls in sitcoms or jokes about Ed Miliband being awkward. We get it now! If you get a man who has been to a school with a polo team, put him in a nice shiny pair of brogues, and stick him on the Graham Norton sofa, you’ve got four Oscar nominations and the lead in a BBC drama before you can say ‘privilege’. ‘And he put on an “I’m a feminist” t-shirt for Emma Watson! What a lovely guy!’

I don’t feel qualified to get on my high horse regarding privilege as I type this in my nice suburban house sitting on my Cath Kidston bedspread whilst my university-educated mother brings me a cup of Earl Grey. And as a student writing an article for an Oxford student paper about better representation of gender, class, race and sexuality in mainstream media, I’m obviously also not against re-hashing old ideas. It’s just that sometimes politics override common sense. Benedict Cumberbatch saying ‘coloured’ or Eddie Redmayne playing a transwoman may or may not be proof that Harrow and Eton can’t teach you everything. The actors I’ve used as examples might have worked their way from rags to riches for their role. I mean, the Hemsworths are Australian – who knows how the class system works there. I imagine with happy ignorance that it has something to do with how many kangaroos live on your beach. But white, straight, cis, predominately middle class men are getting samey now.

This breed is literally everywhere. They love Donnie Darko, rhapsodise about the genius of The Beatles, and adore their mums. They can discuss the pros and cons of diff erent types of whiskey for longer than you would think possible. They hate the comedian Miranda Hart and love Alan Partridge. They are obviously movie anoraks, so this means making fun of The Holiday but taking the Batman films very seriously indeed. They can’t see Nicki Minaj without commenting on how her tits are fake, whilst not seeing that that isn’t the point. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong here. I like Radiohead as much as the next person, occasionally an art-house film isn’t completely awful, and Minaj did perform for an Angolan dictator, I guess. But our screens are crowded with people who you just know have the same cultural references, revere the same artists, and share the same very specifi c idea of what constitutes ‘good’ culture.

Just as some complain about synth-pop nursery rhymes dominating the charts and seeing yet another reality talent show on TV might provoke a sense of ennui, a certain type of person dominating our TV screens and cinemas is a legitimate cultural moan. We might have Idris Elba as Luther, a black Hermione and Orange is The New Black bringing diversity to our Netflix accounts. But where is our BME Doctor Who, our trans superhero in the next Marvel blockbuster, our female lead franchise on the same level as James Bond? All I’m asking is for it not to be run-of-the-mill, unremarkable, and unnoticed when a prime-time chat show doesn’t have a single person who isn’t that Holy Quintet of Male Straight White Middle-Class and Cis. We should be doing the one thing that consumers of culture have a right to do and tend to enjoy; saying, “Well, this is tedious.”

“Dear Ai Weiwei, You have applied for a sixmonth business visit visa, but on this occasion your visa has been restricted,” reads a letter to the artist from the Beijing British Embassy, photographed and posted to his Instagram account. There’s a grotesque irony in the reality of the reason given for his visa restriction being an undeclared “criminal conviction” in China: his 81-day detention for crossing “the red line of Chinese law” is traumatically depicted in S.A.C.R.E.D. (2012), the penultimate piece in the very RA exhibition which prompted his UK visa application.

The viewer is confronted with six identical black cuboids, each with two windows. Because of the tremendous popularity of the exhibition, you have to wait in line to look through them, winding your way past pushchairs and school parties. Inside each one is a painstakingly accurate fi breglass diorama, drenched in bright, white light. Fibreglass Ai Weiwei is scrutinised at close proximity by two guards, and looking from above or from the side, we scrutinise them both.

And yet there’s so much more here than the new surveillance of shifting of the viewer’s gaze, or the irony of the installation’s situation. This is more than a catharsis or a mockery; in S.A.C.R.E.D., basic human rituals of eating, sleeping, and washing are laid (quite literally) bare in hyper-realistic form. The repetition from each scene to the next is a stark inversion of the mundanity of these human rituals: their bleak ‘Sacrament’ is an uncanny anti-sacredness. The paradoxical permanence of these statuesque Doppelgängers and the cruel monotony of the unchanging, white room are in constant tension with the movement tracked from diorama to diorama. Weiwei’s 81, unchanging days are crystallised, monumental, and perverted in S.A.C.R.E.D.– you even see him on the toilet.

Permanence and change wrestle time and time again throughout Weiwei’s output, most infamously in his triptych ‘Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn’ (1995) and accompanying “appropriation” of similar vases, which he has painted in vivid colours. One, bright red, bears the Coca Cola logo. Some critics have tritely dismissed these intensely political gestures as “posturing”, but Weiwei’s harsh comments on the Western fetishisation of ancient Chinese arts, their high monetary values in conflict with Chinese authorities’ seeming lack of care for them, are just one facet of his work with dynasty vases. Here, his activism collides with a snapshot of the split second before the smash, the “vandalistic”, irreversible re-painting of ancient artefacts which once seemed so permanent. These are serious engagements with serious questions about the nature of the work, and the results are both shocking and devastating: in his seeming destruction, he has made something new.

Nevertheless, the garishly post-modern confrontation of the vases is in some way a disappointment after his Qing Dynasty ‘Stool’ and ‘Table with Two Legs on the Wall’ (1997) three rooms earlier. These pieces of seamlessly re-imagined furniture ask all of the same questions as the vases, but the more elegant fi gures that they cut are testament not only to Weiwei’s interrogative approach, but his immensely effective commissioning of traditional woodwork techniques. The sense of entrapment is achieved by the legs literally pressing against the wall, making another floor of it and de-centering the entire room; in ‘Grapes’ (2010), it’s impossible to see where one antique stool ends and another begins.

In his manipulation of mundane furniture forms, Ai Weiwei renders them useless: how do you eat off a table with a fi ve-metre pillar protruding through it? How do you sit on a chair with a tree embedded in it? His “useless objects” are more of the mundane (an armchair, a pushchair,) with added sexuality (anal beads, a butt plug,) and threat (a gas mask, handcuffs, CCTV cameras on the staircase.) In an invocation of permanence strikingly similar to that of Anselm Kiefer’s enormous lead books displayed at the RA this time last year, the “useless objects” are carved out of marble. Yet unlike Kiefer, Weiwei’s mockery of these flagrantly mundane objects sees a traditional Chinese building material transformed into the whitewashed workaday. In the final piece, Weiwei inverts this process, starting with a mundane building material and creating a vast centrepiece. ‘Bicycle Chandelier’ (2015,) as the name suggests, is constructed from China’s most ubiquitous mode of transport. The common bicycle is fragmented and repeated to create towering columns and beautifully imposing geometric tunnels. To be brutally frank, the softer decadence of the white-and-gold sloped plaster ceiling of the RA sort of spoils it.

Weiwei’s most moving transformation at the RA this winter, however, weighs heavily on the gallery floor. 90 tonnes of reinforced steel rods make up the matter of ‘Straight’ (2008-12). For the most dramatic of Weiwei’s “found object” installations, each of these rods were gathered in the wake of the devastating Sichuan earthquake of 2012, hammered straight over several years by a team of six, and painstakingly laid into a vast, undulating, tectonic landscape on the floor. The walls of the gallery are lined with the names of children who died at school during the quake, crushed by their poorly constructed classrooms, many of their deaths unrecognised by Chinese authorities. Along with the screams and cries of the aftermath footage in Weiwei’s film Little Girl’s Cheeks (2008) which plays in the same room, this staggeringly large grid of names forms a harrowing background to a work of such astonishing proportions and beautifully controlled form, as it tapers off at each end. Within the trauma glaring out of each of the four walls, there is something powerfully moving and cathartic conveyed by this landslide of straight metal lines.

The pace of this exhibition is relentless. Between the dissident and the devastating, the ancient and the new, the moving and the funny, there is a constant discussion here and it is anything but dull or flippant. For a handful of weeks this winter, London’s grinding streets held a few rooms full of uselessness, and each one was bold, beautiful and strange.

On 11th January – this week – in 1985, Sam Newton Battenberg Faulkner was born in that most average of Surrey towns, Reigate. So the seeds were sown that some 20 years later would grow into the dreariest of character-void music produced by British artists in years.

Listening to Faulkner’s music is a bit like taking public transport; it can only ever be average or bad, never an actively enjoyable experience. You hear him in shops and, if you have any self-respect, you feel ashamed at yourself for buying your clothes in there. Everything about him, from his ginger beard and white-boy dreads to his faux-lumberjack style and inoffensive, Caleb-Followill-lite voice, screams beige pop – he makes the kind of songs your mum likes but whose names she can never remember. He’s the cleanest dirty musician the industry could ever hope for. The musical equivalent of Buzzfeed.

Perhaps this is a little harsh; I have nothing against Mr Faulkner personally. Rather, what he represents is the beginning of a generation of mass-produced, ‘safe’ artists who dominate the radio waves but aren’t even especially fun to listen to. It was people like Newton Faulkner who brought about the decline in guitar playing and clever songwriting that has seen guitar music and indie bands left in the dust behind hip-hop, house and grime as the music of choice of the nation’s youth. This is not to say being popular is a bad thing – on the contrary – but the Faulkners and Sheerans of this world don’t have anything to justify their existence, let alone their legions of fans. You might hate Kanye with a passion, but at least you have an opinion. Just a few years earlier, Pete and Carl and the Libertines were clawing rock’n’roll out of its grave and making it dance manically round like the emaciated corpse of punk music long assumed dead. Fast forward to 2007, and Newton is Nice with a capital ‘N’.

Something somewhere went horribly wrong. Music should be weird, and exhilarating, and the promulgation of safe-for-work artists over the last few years is neither. Incidentally, on little Newton’s 13th birthday, another entered this world, destined for sacrifice on the high altar of forgettable drudge music, X Factor. Her name? You guessed it. Louisa Johnson. God help those of us who want to be challenged.

An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: “If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …”

Hysteria, T.S. Eliot

If you want a moment to indulge on how miserably repetitive and suppressive society can be, T. S. Eliot is definitely the go-to man. In this excerpt from the short prose-poem Hysteria, drudgery is easily slid to the fore. An elderly waiter goes through the aged rigmarole of laying a checked cloth over a table, desperately trying to cover the table’s rusty ugly surface. In Hysteria being only a tableau of a few seconds, this elderly waiter is eternalised. He stands, trembling, spreading the table cloth forever. “If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden” spills off his tongue over and over again, as he directs said lady and gentleman to their seats, to drink tea in white ceramic tea cups, and shower scone crumbs upon their napkinned laps.

In the full prose poem, this waiter exists only in the background of the narrator‘s mind, his peripheral actions executed by a peripheral him. The narrator’s mind tunes into the waiter as he attempts to distract his thoughts from the heaving of a woman’s breasts, as she raucously laughs. His mind must not be distracted, must harmonise with his predictable and monotonous surroundings.

We must not feel, this tableau narrates. The narrator cannot be alarmed by the movement of a woman’s body, in a moment of uncontrolled laughter. The waiter must lay the table before the lady and gentlemen attempt to sit at it. But only unspokenly, as if all just fell into place by chance.

Here in Cherwell‘s Art and Books section, we are engaged in a pioneering mission to understand just what exactly constitutes the very nature of art in our ever ambitious society. I myself would like to put forward the suggestion that the latest artefact to have emerged from the Kardashian Empire, Khloé Kardashian’s Stronger Looks Better Naked, could indeed be recognised as the stuff of art. Could this book, I wonder, feature among the nominations for the Turner Prize this year? More importantly, should we, as appreciators and consumers of art, consider its position and influence in the increasingly multifarious artistic landscape?

The tome is divided into three distinct sections: Body, Mind, and Heart. This triptych is sandwiched between two substantial collections of photographs of many a Kardashian. Thus, for the visual purists in the world of art, the work still has much to offer. We, the reader, are encouraged to use the photographs as a source of motivation to change our lifestyle from one consisting of hours spent lying prone, head turned towards the white light of Netflix, to one in which we rise before the break of dawn to seek the spiritual guidance of our personal trainer and sustain our enriching, sociable activities on a diet of steel-cut oatmeal and flax. Khloé’s language is unerringly, enthusiastically assertive. In this way, Stronger Looks Better Naked is a response to the modern search for inspiration. It is an encapsulation of the oft searched-for term #goalz.

Indeed, we live in a virtual world in which we are continually forced to better ourselves both physically and mentally, and to compare our own selfies, diets, friends, possessions, achievements, and sexual feats to those of our fellow humans in a perpetual vortex of ‘online sharing.’ Khloé’s book, I would argue, stands apart from this ostentatious maelstrom of ideas and advice. It is the definitive lifestyle guide of our age. The book is, of course, written by a member of a family whose every activity from their runway shows to their leg hair removal is documented, publicised, and absorbed by an enormous section of humanity. This is a family in which every member has it all: money, status, beauty, popularity, adoration, fulfilment, and an ability to live a life whose every aspect is unashamedly free from the chains of modesty. Thus, Khloé’s work provides us, the readers, with quasi-scriptural guidelines for attaining and maintaining the pinnacle of lifestyles: the Kardashian lifestyle.

Thus, if art is a human creation intended to evoke an emotional response or to make a statement about the human condition, then it is my firm belief that Khloé’s book is art. It outlines a clear set of rules that, if followed correctly, enable the reader to realise the Kardashian lifestyle for themselves. The Kardashian lifestyle and, by extension, Khloé’s book, is itself a representation of our society’s obsession with the self. We struggle under the yoke of a relentlessly self-obsessed culture of self-improvement, self-knowledge, self-awareness, and the selfie. Our struggle is intensified by the desperately competitive environment of comparison in which we are all forced to play an active role, no matter how poor our selfie-game nor how strong our dislike of physical activity. Stronger Looks Better Naked is thus an important artistic response to this post-millennial struggle in our society. I for one would be most excited to see this work among the nominations for this year’s Turner Prize or perhaps to see it on display in the Tate Modern to inspire the many thousands of visitors to ‘turn their lives around.’

Please note: The author personally found the book to be extremely helpful during their own quest for motivation in the dark days of January that proceeded a lengthy festive period of Bacchanalian excess and consumption. The author is an avid follower of each Kardashian on every available social media outlet and hopes to move to LA upon graduation.

You’re not alone if you’ve been left a little dispirited by contemporary art exhibitions, thinking you had missed the wow factor of a virtuosic skill showcase or thought too often to yourself, ‘A five-year-old could have done that!’ Nowadays there is less emphasis put on the importance of craftsmanship within art and this is especially evident if one frequents art school degree shows. Craftsmanship is not discouraged, but aesthetic beauty is now seen to sit alongside a variety of other offerings art can make: conceptual intrigue, provocative activism and humorous satire, for example. If, however, you’re feeling a bit cynical about this shift, I’m going to advise you to search for the (probably numerous) screens in the gallery. Craftsmanship is making a major resurgence in Fine Art but it’s happening where you might not think to look.

Emerging from UK art schools right now are some astonishing digital skills. Jasmine Johnson (recently graduated from Goldsmiths) has appeared in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries as ‘one to watch’ and the work showcased certainly is. The video ‘Thieves and Swindlers are not allowed in Paradise’ is predominantly constructed from computer-generated imagery; a fictional 3D environment is painstakingly rendered to simulate the shimmery silk of an Apple Mac computer and the shiny reflectiveness of well-polished oak floorboards. Overlooking the conceptual merits for now, this work is aesthetically and technically rich.

Rebecca Merrill, who graduated from the Slade in 2015 offered an Oculus Rift experience at her degree show. Technically it was incomparably superior to the Oculus Rift offering made by the incredibly well established artist, Carston Höller, at the Hayward Gallery during the same summer. Merrill works predominantly with video as a medium but has branched into video games, a prism also masterfully deployed for artistic means by home-grown talent Laurien Ash. Laurien graduated from the Ruskin in 2015 and was immediately offered a slot in Modern Art Oxford’s project space as part of the Platform Award. Her ideas manifest themselves through interactive game environments, which Laurien amazingly builds by herself – not something professional game designers do! An artwork well executed, displaying technical nous and labour hours is appealing, and it makes a generous offer to its audience, providing multiple layers of intrigue and enjoyment.

At a basic level it can be aesthetically admired, and then one can delve deeper into the ideas and process behind the work. Video and digital artists emerging into the art world often demonstrate technical proficiency equivalent to the virtuosic painting we already know and love. Now, let’s give the screens some time.

Luke Wright’s poetry is raw with emotions, uncovering experiences often forgotten in the flurry of an Oxford term. Listening to his poetry online, I feel tired of the unfaltering short-sightedness of the drive for perfection rampant in the Oxford academic system. We are trained within an inch of our lives to analyse everything – every emotion, motivation and economic structure – with cold reason. Yet in this there is something the unfalteringly driven tutors and grasping BNOCs of Oxford lose: empathy skills. This is something Luke Wright’s poetry brings back in tender detail. It is not always about who is right or wrong, who has the power to win the argument: it is about where people are and what they experience.

I have the thrilling experience to interview him before his upcoming show. His dulcet Essex tones invoke an involuntary homesickness, which is odd because this is the vac, and I am at home. We start off with some Essex nostalgia. He actually went to Colchester Sixth Form, the same school as my brother. I meant to ask him about his poem ‘Essex Lion.’ The original news story was hilarious, his poem perhaps better. I also meant to ask about the hair. He co-wrote a book with Joel Stickley called Who Writes This Crap?, which looks simply brilliant (even if I haven’t actually read any further than the title page). But in the stress of a first ever interview and the caffeine of that overly strong coffee I just drank, I forgot. So I move on to the more important questions.

Essex or Suffolk? East Anglia (correct answer.) We talk about the North/ South divide and how it is really the fringes such as the East which you should watch out for. We are of course a wondrous region of our own, which will eventually take over the world with Olly Murs and Maggie Smith. I am glad he agrees.

So then moving away from the great geographical debate to the actual reason for the interview, why poetry? He describes how he saw some poets when he was 17 and fell in love with the art. They were passionate, exciting, funny and inspired him to start writing his own stuff. I asked who he would describe as his biggest inspiration. He mentions Martin Newell, John Cooper Clarke and Philip Larkin, and the list goes on. He also doesn’t hesitate to add that friends and people around him can often be the biggest influence and in his uncannily realistic character portrayals in some of his poems, you can understand how. He revels in the joy of spoken poetry, as he claims you can write something in the morning and be performing it by the afternoon. Wright per formed this year at Edinburgh Fringe, winning a Fringe First award for new writing, a load of four and five star reviews, and The Stage Award For Acting Excellence. I try to ascertain where is his favourite place to perform. I notice he is performing in Diss. I don’t know how much the Cherwell general readership knows about Diss, but for me it has always just been a train station. I am quickly put right. Diss is actually quite pretty, despite the row upon row of gravestones you pass as you enter the train station. Apparently there is a quite good gravestone shop, not just loads of dead people. Wright plays a number of venues; from the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall to the Colchester Arts centre, so trying to choose just one favourite was hard and, I guess, a fairly stupid question.

Having noticed the politics of some of his work, I ask about Corbyn. He says he considers him a principled man, who has been on the right side of history multiple times and that he is astute, a rare thing in modern politics. However he despondently questions whether Corbyn will ever be able to win an election because of the self-destructive infighting in the party and the wrestle for soul of Labour. His message for the current Labour Party? “Shut up and leave him (Corbyn) alone. He needs a fucking good team around to win an election.”

I ask him what concerns him most about our generation (this provoked the inevitable debate as to whether we really were part of the same generation. He’s now 34, so perhaps not.) His answer was blunt. Life’s tough. Unemployment. Really the same issues which span across the whole board of society. He worries how, with the welfare state being hacked away at, people in the most vulnerable positions are being hit. Looking to the future, he wonders at the power of technology in influencing future politics and doubts whether the public sector can survive.

Moving onto the more serious questions: cats or dogs? Cats (dogs are a lot of work!) He quickly puts me right in stating that cats and dogs are not really comparable. Dogs or children would be a more apt question because of the apparent degree of loving attachment. So I ask that. He says children. I realise how desperately I need to get better at this interviewing malarkey.

I ask him to summarise the show in five words. He replies – political, intense, funny, sounds good.

I then ask what message he would give to the average, exams-stressed, time-pressed Oxford student. Come watch the show! It will hopefully feel really relevant at the moment. It’s about the Labour party, being a student, finding something to believe in and the intense relationships you build at University. He highlights as a lasting point the formative power of our time at university. I cannot but agree.

Luke Wright’s multi award-winning political drama ‘What I Learned from Johnny Bevan’ comes to The North Wall, Oxford on Friday the 29th January 2016. Tickets here.

David Bowie passed away on the 10th January, after having fought against cancer for 18-months. This article was written a day before his death.

Not only did he celebrate his 69th birthday last Saturday, David Bowie also released his new album intriguingly named ‘★’, or Blackstar. Just two years after The Next Day, this new creation comes with its own themes and indeed its individual creature to add to the artist’s collection, quickly giving Bowie yet another reason to celebrate: it has only taken the album two days to reach the top of Amazon’s UK best-selling list, in front of Adele, with the vinyl equally in the top 10.

But this is as far as the festive mood goes. The album has more in common with the haunting sounds of Outside (1995) than with the hopeful messages of tracks such as ‘Dancing Out in Space’ from The Next Day.

David Bowie’s extremely versatile voice is backed up by drums beating irregular but ominously present rhythms and disharmonious strings, giving birth to an atmosphere that makes the expression “angsty” seem hollow altogether. ‘Girl loves me’, the fifth of this slightlyshorter-than-usual seven track album, is particularly obscure both in terms of musical choices and the lyrics themselves, and goes to show how electronic sounds can be used to complement acoustic instruments in a subtle balance. Most of the lyrics of this song, like “Party up moodge, nanti vellocet round on Tuesday”, are based on a mix of slang and made-up languages, using Bowie’s voice as a separate instrument in itself as he continues experimenting with combinations of echoes, dissonance and phrases with surprisingly high-pitched cry-like ends. Mostly made up of three distinct parts like ‘Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)’ – which evolves from a rocky intro with a bit of a funk tang into dark jazz featuring long solos of the artist’s favourite instrument, the saxophone, progressing towards a more expansive style at the end – this album’s songs play with the absence of sound as much as its presence. Liberated of any pretence of commercial interest, the artist is able to write slightly longer tracks and therefore give more importance to every sound and switch of tone that might strike the listener as out of place.

Easily recognisable as part of David Bowie’s long discography, Blackstar remains nonetheless a symbolic step further into experimentation, both musically and aesthetically, with the rather disturbing music videos for ‘Lazarus’ and ‘Blackstar’ directed by Swedish film director Bo Johan Renck and the cryptic design of the album cover.