It’s hard to say which I find more offensive: Gary Glitter, or Ian McEwan’s ‘masterpiece’ Atonement.

When it comes to intellectual stimulation, I would willingly choose a Hollyoaks omnibus over rereading 371 pages of formulaic, contrived and empty-headed posturing. If there is one thing I can’t stand it’s lazy literary navel-gazing masquerading as a historical novel.

For those lucky few who are unacquainted with this dubious stain on McEwan’s otherwise spotless record, Atonement is a bog-standard war-story romance with all the twee trimmings and typical pseudo-intellectual literary references that plague McEwan’s works. The story is standard Booker-fodder: you don’t really need to know the plot because it’s establishmentera McEwan, who writes to a really shoddy formula of repression, innocence, and poignant twists of fate.

Come on, you know the story because you saw the film. It’s a deep insight into the vagaries of the human condition, remember? Anyway, if the flimsy excuse for a narrative twist doesn’t put you off, the sheer hype surrounding the book surely will.

How one miserable little tale of some posh bird and her sexual inhibitions can generate almost as much hysteria as Princess Diana’s funeral is testament to the sad fact that ‘dumbing-down’ is becoming an cultural institution. This is Tate Modern for people who can be bothered to read.

I don’t find all of McEwan’s work such a dull insult to my intelligence. The Cement Garden, The Innocent and Amsterdam were all competent studies of guilt, envy and sexual tension, but McEwan is no Margaret Atwood.

Atonement tarnishes a decent reputation. In 2006, McEwan was accused of plagiarising Lucilla Andrews’ autobiography No Time for Romance. Predictably, the British literati jumped to McEwan’s defence, but the truth remains that Atonement is essentially a derivative rehash of the life of a less than minor literary figure.

Why McEwan insists upon marring perfectly average narratives with fawning references to Oxbridge, the class system and other people’s work is a mystery to anyone who has even looked at a book recently. However, there is one thing I can say in defence of this self-consciously convoluted postmodernist waffle: at least it’s not as bad as the film.

Damien Hirst has never played by the rules. Known as a joker at school, famously receiving an ‘E’ on his art A-Level, he channelled his rule-breaking instinct into shocking and lucrative art early on. He showed his entrepreneurial skills while still at art school by running the momentous Freeze exhibition in 1988 with fellow art students from Goldsmiths College, which subsequently changed the face of British contemporary art.

Not much has changed. This summer saw an event described by Hirst himself as ‘probably the most amazing show I’ve put on’. In a move that shocked the art world he disregarded the accepted rules and took 223 of his works straight to auction, without going via a dealer. It had never been done before, and considering how much the stood to gain financially from this (the dealer can take 50%), Damien demonstrated that his business skills are still well ahead of the game.

Sotheby’s on Bond Street housed the Beautiful Inside My Head Auction which one might describe as a ‘best of’ Hirst’s work. There were a handful of sharks, vitrines, spot and spin paintings, works with butterflies, skulls and diamonds – all Hirst trademarks – with more unusual pieces included. It was like a retrospective of a scale never before seen, and indeed was treated like one by the public.

More than eight thousand people came to see what was effectively a free exhibition, doing Hirst no end of good in terms of publicity. Most famous was the Golden Calf, a bullock that wore golden shoes and a golden orb above its head, a biblical reference. It sold for £9,200,000.

Financially this was particularly interesting because this was not a collection of Hirst’s past works. All the pieces were dated 2008 and had been produced over the last two years by Hirst’s six studios, working flat out. The result was a vast collection of pieces which filled both floors of Sotheby’s and comprised the largest exhibition it had ever put on.

Such mass production in his studios is not new for Hirst – he employs approximately 160 people in his empire – but it does raise questions of authenticity. When all it takes is a signature to make the work authentically his, is Hirst seeing just how far he can push buyers and just how much money he can make?

This isn’t a new thought though; the conceptual artist Piero Manzoni signed people’s bodies in the 50s and declared them works of art. He later canned and sold his own shit.

What is unusual is Hirst’s openly mercurial manner of avoiding the dealer and churning out works in the vein of his most famous, and most expensive, greatest hits. Traditionally a dealer is an artist’s route to sales as negotiator and advertiser, but here Sotheby’s did all the advertising and drew huge crowds.

The auction itself was spread over two days; the evening of 15th September and the next day. It was filled with everyone from Bianca Jagger and Jay Jopling (owner of the White Cube), and Hirst’s art dealer (until now), to yours truly. Everyone wanted to see what would happen; would Damien make the £50 million he was asking for and how would the art world respond?

That evening alone made £70.5 million, with many telephone bids across the world. The costliest items were the infamous Golden Calf, a shark in formaldehyde and a huge medicine case of diamonds. The whole auction sold a spectacular 98% of works over the two days for a total profit of £111 million, breaking the record for a single artist auction.

Hirst is playing a game with his buyers; his works have frequently tripled and quadrupled in value after they’ve been sold; his famous shark is worth $8 million, having originally been sold for £50,000. The advance estimates he set for works at this auction showed that Hirst was trying to anticipate this jump in value and reap the profits himself.

Cunning, but that’s Hirst for you. He is the artist who simply cut a shark in half and pickled it. That shark is now worth $8 million. Hirst himself is worth several billion. The man is no fool. He is an acute manipulator of his media, not to mention the viewing public. Of course, he is open to the accusation of making art for money, rather than money through art.

What he creates is so far beyond the reach of the average wallet, yet the public lap it up with glee. So, what next for the man who can make £70m in one night? According to him, he’s taken up painting in his shed.

I’m more accustomed to seeing Kevin Spacey’s figure whirling across a cinema screen than standing nervously beside a lectern, but I gradually get used to this odd displacement of film star in an antiquated Oxford setting. Well, not that antiquated; his lecture took place in St Catz.

Spacey has taken the position of Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre, a role previously played by thesps such as Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Thelma Holt. It’s a professorship which is associated with the innovation and excellence which Oxford drama, and indeed Oxford University, prizes itself. A lot rests on his performance this year. Indeed, a lot rests on his entrance.

As I take my seat, the dulcet tones of three nasal American girls drift into my ears. They are trying to track the professor’s progress up to the lectern. The clamouring whine rises in pitch as their goggle-eyed expressions fix enviously on a group of students who have occupied the centre column of seating. They resemble over-eager meerkats – with digital cameras.

The audience is a diverse bunch. Walking through St Catz on the way in, you could be forgiven for thinking there was a high-profile charity event on, so large are the hordes of suited and booted city sorts piling towards the theatre.

An elderly gentleman examining his paper is seated next to an elegantly dressed young woman, while, in the row behind, a collection of dons hold a quiet discussion. There’s a horde of photographers seated in front of me, and an eager-looking chap murmuring something into a dictaphone across the aisle.

Spacey is clearly in demand. He is introduced by the Master of St. Catherine’s as a ‘towering figure, a Goliath in the world of drama’. It is hyperbole of the grandest sort, which, despite appealing to my poetic imagination, is superfluous.

Spacey is uncomfortable. He half-listens to his own credentials, turns and smiles at the Catz students seated to his right. Later he tells us, ‘I would so prefer to have been out of the room while he did all that’, and requests to be called not ‘Professor’, but ‘plain Kevin’.

His credentials imply that he is far from just ‘plain Kevin’. Having pursued an illustrious career in theatre and film for over 20 years, he took the post of Artistic Director at the Old Vic in 2003. Since then he has pioneered a series of projects including the Old Vic New Voices scheme, which aims to encourage theatrical involvement amongst young people.

He is humble. Stressing how ‘I hope that by the end of my tenure here, I will be worthy of the title of professor’, he repeatedly stresses the primacy of the students’ views and ideas, deflecting questions about his own intentions with the response that they will discuss it and work out exactly what it is that they want out of the programme.

To the cynical in the audience, this may seem like a lack of conviction, a lack of direction. To me, it seems like the thoughts of a man who is not here for the fame or publicity, but for the young people his role is designed to aid: ‘It’s not about me anymore’. His lecture is interesting and amusing.

Focused primarily upon development of his own career and what it has taught him, he praises ‘people who took a chance on me’, such as Jack Lemon and Joseph Pap, and emphasises his desire to give the same back, to honour and preserve a ‘cultural landscape’ which seems increasingly threatened by the current economic climate. There are the odd few clichés. I particularly enjoyed the ‘endless mystery of the Mona Lisa’s smile’. It’s clearly a speech from prompt notes.

A little reticent, he shuffles. But, with the accidental destruction of the microphone, laughter, and the unprompted, ‘Note to self: don’t lean on the lectern’, he warms up. In the question time at the end, he is exuberant, when, without script or prompts, he is free to express his delight in the ‘great, humanising force’ of drama, and the ‘new work of today which will become the classics of tomorrow’.

I originally intended to rail against the fame complex with which the appointment to this position seems to be associated. Why Stewart and Spacey? Why not any one of the equally qualified thesps without the famous name? But Spacey, with his remarkable gentleness, the honesty of his manner, and his clear love for what he does, will, I have no doubt, prove to be a wonderful professor.

Personally, I liked him best for dressing down the Master of St. Catz. Getting the name of his first Shakespearean play wrong (it was Henry IV, and not Henry VI), the Master was caught out by Spacey’s quip that ‘You can’t trust everything you find on the Internet’. He’ll be a fresh force in Oxford, to be sure.

Mia Matsumiya builds robots. They do cool things for 30, 40 seconds; they twitch, malfunction; then they die. She calls them ‘tragibots’.

She also makes music. The creation is a similarly painstaking process, interweaving neoclassical form with structural rigidity and melodic freedom, then casting it all in terms of the guitars and vocals more familiar to doom or sludgemetal connoisseurs. We call it ‘postmetal’.

This is a genre which, though rooted amongst hardcore and metal musicians looking to express themselves beyond the verse-chorus-verse straitjacket, is now just as much home to jazz, psychedelic and even classically-trained artists. They simply want to turn up the amps and scream a bit. For each band tagged with the name, a distinct musical heritage is apparent.

There are raw, fire-and-brimstone blues behind Oxbow’s The Narcotic Story, while Isis… well, Isis seem to have rather a penchant for bears. Enraged ones, specifically. All of which might sound horribly pretentious, an accusation sometimes difficult to dismiss.

Red Sparowes’ At the Soundless Dawn, an instrumental concept album about the Maoist Great Leap Forward featuring 208 words of track title, probably deserves to be so branded. But to focus on the self-indulgence is to get caught up on the ‘post-‘; and forget that the music is still very much metal.

Oxbow’s ‘Eugene Robinson’ can turn a room of lethargic, undernourished indie geeks into a convincing reinterpretation of a Hieronymous Bosch image with nothing more than his tortuous howling, while thrusting his bemuscled form at the audience.

He often adds to the aura by involving the mic stand in illicit, aggressive and possibly quite painful relations. There are more accessible styles; 15-minute orchestral-rock compositions are never going to make good football chants. This is music that demands, seizes and finally rewards, your complete attention.

The juxtaposition of power chords and piccolos might seem a perplexing one, but if you can stomach that thought and open up your mind a little bit, you will find that the music is immensely rewarding. Who, after all, doesn’t want to live the dream, and one day relish the prospect of having a tormented soul thrust his grief, and his groin, in your face, to an accompaniment of violins?

Every few years another Oasis album comes out and people
fall over. Some hit the ground in disgust: ‘Oasis? Oafs in parkas fixated on an imaginary Sixties with a frontman whose first love is fighting German gangsters! Rubbish!’. Others crumple to their knees in tribal admiration, worshipping any sweatsozzled stage worthy of the Gallagher
loafers.

The core question for both these camps is: ‘what is Oasis for?’ Flatterers know that, at a gig in one of the enormo-domes the band are wont to play in these days, they can lunge a beer-spattered, check-patterned forearm round their best mate’s neck, probably known as Craig or Darren, and go ‘mad fer it’ over ‘Champagne Supernova’ and ‘Wonderwall’.

Slightly more reserved fans see in them the replication of a great tradition in popular music: appropriation. The Beatles have always been Oasis’ target of choice. Noel rarely manages not to mention them in interviews, and Liam went around for some years actually thinking he was the resurrected spirit of John Lennon.

He’s not. But what Oasis have always managed to do is create a product that people want. They release an album and it sells, and there is no doubt that what they do is much more in the spirit of the tradition of guitar-based popular music than timid noodling by dance-fixated nerds on Moog synthesizers having to stop every five seconds to scrape their floppy fringe away from their eyes without disturbing their manscara.

To blast away these waifs with real rock and roll, Oasis storm back with their seventh studio album Dig Out Your Soul, a warm embrace of the tradition of appropriation. Here The Beatles become more than an affectionate albatross around the necks of Noel and Liam – they become a kind of daemon, supporting, bolstering, encouraging, but always leaving important decisions to the demands of 2008.

In earlier albums it seemed as if Noel in particular was afraid of innovation in the envelope-cauterising manner of his heroes. The attempts on 2001’s Standing on the Shoulders of Giants ended in critical contempt, although moments on that album, like the paranoid swirl of ‘Gas Panic!’, were worthy of minor Lennon/McCartney achievements. Noel got around the charge of backwardness by merely aping the Fab Four’s developments and assuming that would suffice for critics who wanted progression.

Let’s be clear; there is little real innovation as such on this album, unless you count quirky-ish beats and using a vocoder. Oasis would have no point if they tried to innovate in a spectacular manner.

Would we really want from this band a Radioheadstyle self-consciousness that spirals quickly into humourless defensiveness? A Kid A trajectory that shows a band so disconnected from their fans that they refuse to play ‘Creep’? Oasis continue to respect the taste of their fans, however banal that taste may seem to some high-brow critics.

As usual, most of the album is penned by Noel, with three offerings from Liam and one each from Gem Archer and Andy Bell respectively. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the latter two are the most forgettable. Liam builds on his earlier promise with an elegant (for Oasis) turn on ‘I’m Outta Time’ and the psych-rock rave-up ‘Ain’t Got Nothin’. Noel remains the furthest from the Beatlesburden. This may seem contradictory, but what he’s managed to do is to make his songs sound just like… his other songs, and not like his musical idols.

The pulse of ‘Waiting for the Rapture’ and rocket-blast of lead single ‘The Shock of the Lightning’ anchor the first half of the album firmly in Noel’s classicist Oasis vein. There’s still the wide-eyed, embracing melody, the rather silly lyrics (‘I got my heebie-jeebies in a little bag’) but it all bubbles underneath what is actually very murky music for Oasis.

The album’s dense and multilayered arrangements mean that the aural world that the album creates is perhaps the most consistent, atmospheric and enticing since 1994’s breakthrough Definitely Maybe. So, what is the point? Well, Oasis are a fallback, a steady hand on the throttle, a cup of tea, a shag pile carpet.

They present no real difficulty, no need for anxious concentration for the listener, although on this work such attention would be rewarded. Their real purpose lies in the recreation of origins from the vantage point of retrospective appropriation. On this new album they’re exciting, energetic.

Liam is still probably the best rock and roll singer of the last twenty years and these songs point to a future that gestures to journalistic questions of musical purpose with a two-fingered salute.

Four stars