Following the critical acclaim and unprecedented success of Skyfall, perhaps the most discussed aspect of Sam Mendes’ second outing as a Bond director has been whether this film will match up to its 2012 predecessor. Fortunately, whilst it might not, Spectre stands well enough on its own as a Bond film that the audience begins not to be concerned about that but rather just enjoys it as a solid franchise entry in its own right. The dedicated fans of the series have long been divided between the preference towards the old-fashioned suave gadget-orientated films, and the new, grittier, more grounded and flawed Bond that has characterised the franchise since Daniel Craig first took the role in 2006. Spectre delivers the perfect mix of the old and the new to please both types of fans.

The new M (Ralph Fiennes) suspends Bond from his duty following an unauthorised mission in Mexico, complete with a high-octane helicopter fight sequence. But with secret help from Q (Ben Whishaw) and Miss Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) he disobeys M and travels to Rome and later Austria to investigate, where he discovers the organisation Spectre and this film’s Bond girl, Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux).

The returning characters from Skyfall make a solid supporting cast, with Ralph Fiennes suitably filling Judi Dench’s shoes, and a memorably strong performance from Naomie Harris, who unshackles the desk-bound character incarnation seen in older Bond films and is happier to get her hands dirty. Seydoux’s Bond girl similarly makes a pleasant change from the damsel in distress, especially with her close connection to the Spectre organisation, and her ballsy and likeable character is a strong match for Craig – their chemistry is one of the film’s notable strengths.

Spectre’s villains are perhaps among its weaker elements, not because they pose little threat, but because they are underused. Wrestler-turned-actor Dave Bautista, as the henchman Mr Hinx, allows for some of the film’s more memorable fight sequences, yet overall he succumbs to the template of a generic henchman and leaves fans yearning for something akin to his more satisfying outing in last summer’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Perhaps most hotly anticipated about Spectre is the return of legendary Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, in the form of double Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz. Unfortunately, however, Waltz is given a paltry share of screen time, and his characterisation is disappointingly bland for a supposed criminal mastermind.

The action sequences in this film make it a blast to watch, not least because of their tributes to familiar scenes from classic Bond films, such as the brutal fights aboard train journeys and speedboating down the Thames. Spectre can in many ways be seen as a celebration of the Bond franchise, both old and new, with the reintroduction of the Spectre organisation allowing for a neat unification of the plots of the preceding Daniel Craig films (with the notable exception of Quantum of Solace, which the filmmakers, like the audience, would rather pretend never happened), and whatever opinion you hold about Sam Smith’s ‘Writing’s on the Wall’, the opening title sequence is as visually spectacular as ever.

While not without its faults and possibly marginally inferior to the last film, Spectre is an indisputably enjoyable film for fans of the Bond series, particularly the classic ones, or the action genre in general. Its lengthy runtime is hardly felt owing to its strong performances and unforgettably entertaining action sequences, and it succeeds as a hugely satisfying tribute to the iconic 007 franchise.

The most commercially successful works of art are rarely the most thought-provoking, the most intelligent or influential. Just take T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, for instance. Commercially, it was a complete flop, and only sold 450 copies on its first run. And yet now we recognise it as one of the most important poems of the twentieth century.

What ‘The Waste Land’ was for twentieth-century poetry, Vampire’s Kiss was for twentieth-century film. What is Vampire’s Kiss? Well, as with any work of art so multi-layered and complex, the only answer is ‘many things’.

It is the tragic tale of a man who becomes convinced that he is a vampire; it is the film which proved the incomparable ability of Nicolas Cage to convey a character’s mental turmoil in a style truly his own. More than that, it is the seminal masterpiece of Urban Psychogothic cinema.

Whether you like the film will depend on your ability to recognise Cage’s genius as a tragedian, something critics have failed to do throughout his career. Their accusations are always the same: that he can’t convey serious emotion realistically, that all he is actually doing on screen is clowning around. The only riposte which needs to be made to these criticisms is: go watch the final scenes of The Wicker Man. Nobody can question that the Cagean style is essentially a realistic one, once they have seen him running around in a bear costume punching people.

Like The Wicker Man, Vampire’s Kiss is a work of high seriousness, and Cage’s performance reflects this. The film is essentially a reimagining of classical tragedy. Like Oedipus Rex, it tracks the descent of a rich and respectable man down to the depths of depravity and despair. Many a tragedy is begun by a chance occurrence; Romeo and Juliet would never have died in one another’s arms had Romeo never gatecrashed the Capulets, and Cage would not have had to run round New York shouting “I’m a vampire!” at passers-by, had a vampire bat not, at the start of the film, interrupted his one night stand.

If Vampire’s Kiss is to be compared to any tragedy (and of course, it should be) then the closest comparison is actually to Othello, because we the audience realise that its descent into tragedy is based on a mere misunderstanding; this bat has not in fact turned Cage’s character into a vampire. He just thinks it has. So we, the audience, are painfully aware that he has no more reason to spend his days sleeping under his upturned couch (a makeshift coffin) than Othello has to strangle Desdemona.

The pathos of Cage’s descent into madness is often heart-wrenching. I challenge anyone not to shed a tear at the scene in which Cage, having convinced himself that it would be best for humanity if he did not exist to threaten it, walks the streets of New York carrying a makeshift stake made out of plywood, imploring people, “I’m a vampire! Kill me!” and then walks into a wall.

Even more pathetic (in the sense of pathos, of course) is that he then convinces himself this wall is called ‘Sharon’, and is not a wall at all but the love of his life.

My first encounter with Yayoi Kusama’s work was almost impossible to forget. Rounding the corner of a street in the Japanese mountain town of Matsumoto, I came face to face with a giant, winding cluster of tulips, bursting skyward from the floor. Garishly coloured, as tall as a house and patterned with gigantic polka dots, the complex, twisting maze of stems and buds demanded exploration and discovery from every conceivable angle. The permanent installation, entitled ‘The Visionary Flowers’ is a fascinating piece of contemporary sculpture. The monstrously kitsch flowers seemed both deeply empty in that pop-art way, yet at the same time hugely personal. This first meeting is amongst the my most memorable that I’ve had with any artist.

But it’s when you encounter your second, third and fourth pieces by Yayoi Kusama that things start to make sense. The 86 year old Japanese artist, born in Matsumoto before stints of various lengths in Tokyo and New York which preceded her permanent residency in a centre for the mentally ill, will cover absolutely anything with dots. From canvases,to entire apartments, and even naked bodies participating in an orgy, nothing escapes adornment by Kusama and her brush. But this is not a Lichtenstein style deconstruction. For Kusama, the dots are both a lifeline and a curse.

“One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate,” This is how Kusama describes the genesis of a 1954 painting of a spotted flower. These dots, and her endless repetition of them onto surfaces are a symptom of her obsessional compulsive disorder, but they also provide a means for her to escape herself. In her words, they are “a way to infinity.” In the repetitious nature of of panting these multitudes of dots, she finds peace. For Kusama, the orbs have come to symbolise celestial bodies, and even the entire universe. Through the act of painting, she escapes herself.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in her ever popular installation, The Infinity Rooms. Having toured the world, these chambers, of apparently finite but seemingly infinite space, allow the viewer to position their heads in a small window, and gaze into a mirrored room full of hanging balls of light. Reflected in infinity, the viewer feels lost, peaceful, and atomised by the endless, dotted universe. Before them lies an infinite star field. Here Kusama allows her viewers peace, solitude, and an understanding of herself.

Kusama’s influence can be felt across the art world, inspiring avant-garde contemporaries such as Warhol, with whom the shared practice of prolific production invites tempting but ultimately fruitless comparison. But whilst Warhol sought to question the market definitions of art, to Kusama its purpose and value is self evident. It’s a necessity. And whilst Warhol kept his critical ambitious ambiguous and playful, Kusama was openly political. She once invited Richard Nixon for a session of vigorous love making if he would only declare an end to the Vietnam War, and participated in in a homosexual wedding all the way back in the 70s.

But what of the individual herself, attempting to lose herself in a crowd of spots? She is rarely photographed away from her art, or out of clothes that don’t camouflage her into the work she is exhibiting. So whilst she’s not quite yet become one with infinity, she’s still making her way there, one meticulously painted white dot after the other.

In recent years, ISIS’ destruction of ancient monuments and artefacts in the Middle East has horrified the world; symbolic, performative acts recorded and replayed across headlines are the propagandistic art of their violent politics. This past spring, ISIS stormed the Iraqi city of Mosul, and with it, one of the most ancient homes of Christianity – the Nineveh Plains. Thousands of Christians were forced to flee, leaving behind them the homes and culture that had resisted thousands of years of persecution. Taking what little they could, the Christians abandoned the rest to ISIS. As if it was not enough to be driven from home, work and community, the ISIS soldiers made ruins of their spiritual monuments and artifacts – structures and objects revered as the emblems of God, the “artworks” studied from our air-conditioned lecture halls, in glowing PowerPoints and glossy books. Every dome obliterated, every manuscript burned is a potent message broadcast worldwide. Like the Nazis of all-too recent memory, ISIS destroys the physical materialisations – the cultural expressions – of its political enemies. ISIS’s attacks make clear the political and cultural importance of the art and the symbolic – a fact that becomes all too obvious when we see these symbols being destroyed in front of us.

Broadly speaking, ‘Art’, in peace and in war, has ever been and will continue to be an es- sential mode of symbolic communication for humanity. In general discussion, many disregard the true importance of art, especially when actual lives are threatened and being taken. In the world of academia, we often get caught up attempting to answer questions about what art is and what its use and purposes are. Plato, Tolstoy, Kant, Baudelaire and Greenberg argue over the centuries-long dilemma; they dip into theology here, politics there, toeing the edge of the enormous abyss of ideas about our own existence, divine and earthly.

Despite the confounding complexities of the idea, it is this relationship to the concept of art, so woven up with our sense, or questions about, ourselves that makes art itself so important and consequently, the acts of ISIS powerfully disturbing. Surely the history of monumental art and architecture is marked by the wealthy and powerful themselves; people who manipulated lower strata of society to generate messages of their own. The bricks of our pyramids and cathedrals, castles and capitals may have been laid by slaves, gilded portraits funded by feudal underclasses, but we cannot deny them their eternal resonance; their language, unwritten, speaks to our personal experience. The genesis of art, whether for honestly or politically pious reasons, oftentimes lies in humanity’s need to express and understand divinity, spirituality, morality. As if in prayerful meditation, medieval monks in isolated scriptoriums devoted their lives to the creation of glistening illuminated manuscripts, which in themselves were supposed to inspire the same effect in future readers. Ancient calligraphic Chinese landscape paintings can highlight the smallness of man, dwarfed amidst the powerful and moving spirits of nature. In an age of industrial boom, decadent wealth and Dickensian poverty, Victorians A.W. Pugin and John Ruskin summon the spectre of an art beautiful in her goodness to restore a perceived loss of morality.

Certain experiences with ‘Art’ stand in relief in my own mind. How, in my first Evensong at Christ Church, I was inexplicably moved beyond myself beneath the vaulted domes of stone. Impossibly light as air, they trembled with angelic stained-glass rainbows and angelic voices. Suddenly I was unaware of physical nuances and felt external to the strict confines and categories of time and place, religious creed and social circumstance. At that moment a single person can be united with a long history of the human multitude and its collective feeling; the undefinable, invisible ‘heart’ that pulses curious emotions through each and every one of us. Wander through a museum for a while; admire the faces of pale Renaissance Madonnas; lose yourself in Turner’s tumultuous oceans of light; contemplate graceful Japanese ceramics; long to reach out touch the marble muscles of ancient Hercules. Indeed, these pieces were created in vastly different times by different people in a wide range of circumstances. But what is it that draws us to them, makes us long for that “divine” experience felt at Evensong? What makes a Christian priest in Iraq weep as he laments manuscripts, early religious foundational documents, dismembered by men masked in black? What makes us weep with him?

This is the unexplainable phenomenon Im- manuel Kant grapples with as he attempts to determine our judgements of the beautiful; we appreciate his struggle because we too are unable to verbally wrap our minds around these mysterious emotions stimulated by certain places and objects of art. Particularly in our age, art (perhaps in this instance, ‘visual culture’ would be the more appropriate term) can be a privilege of peace, an icon of our individual, spiritual freedoms. In its physicality, it represents what is beyond ourselves, our religious, political and personal liberties. Nevertheless, ISIS understands its power, however mysterious. Art has a place in war. Similarly, art must become our tool, our continued advocate for peace. Where they destroy, others must rebuild. We must become the ‘Iconophiles’ of our day, standing against iconoclasts who attack the buildings that literally structure our valued ideas of ‘self-hood’.

In making many of these statements, I recognise that I am of course making vast generalisations. However, I believe that in our drive toward (quite necessary) specificity in scholarship, we occasionally forget the truths underlying our generalisations: the realisation that art, to this day, still works on us in a level above the simply historical or theoretical.

So if we have, through time looked at and categorized art according to its many roles – art for a king’s sake, for religion’s sake, for beauty’s sake, for its own sake – it is important to here realize and appreciate both our individual personal and broad universal claims in an art for peace’s sake