Tuesday 7th October 2025
Blog Page 758

Playlist: Childhood

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This week’s playlist contains a mixture of youthful joi de vive and warm waves of nostalgia, as the likes of Avicii, Ed Sheeran and the Beatles combine in a unanimous celebration of childhood. Whether yours was spent climbing trees, donning the infamous Bieber flick or playing Minecraft, these songs give us reassurance that youth is most definitely not wasted on the young.

 

Single-minded Brexiteers are the real snowflakes

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So dainty and fragile are their egos that they cannot bear the sight of a blue starry flag or the words “European Union” on an identity document. They want to seal themselves into
a “safe space”, where those whose opinions and traditions don’t mirror their own are banned.
They are triggered by the colour of their passports and insist that their self-styled identity as ‘British’ be respected by all whom they encounter.
They make heartfelt pleas, proclaiming that they want their country back, and they surround themselves with those who agree with them.
They are wrapped up in protective, protectionist cotton wool dyed the colours of the Union Jack (wool from Commonwealth sheep, one expects).
It seems the days are gone when you could say you were in favour of freedom of movement without offending someone. Any mention of the single market is likely to get
you shut down with some fluff about Brexit indeed meaning Brexit. Proposing to let the public have a say on the customs union could get you labelled a ‘Remoaner’.
Whatever happened to free speech and debate?
Here’s what happened: snowflake sensibilities stem from a culture where people are told they can ‘have it all’. Many of those spouting pro-Brexit messages matured in the echo chambers of old boys’ clubs. Narcissism develops when virtues are extolled and negatives never questioned.

Some unelected politicians living it up in Brussels – such as former Ukip leader Nigel Farage – have had their every effort praised by their lackeys. Michael Gove manages to gloss over the abuses of Empire in saying that it “exported” democracy worldwide.
Is it any wonder that some yearn to bring back a time when Britain was seemingly free from the rule of alleged ‘European overlords’?
It is often said that overpraise of a child’s achievements plus a lack of reality checks equal fantastical expectations. This explains the childlike reasoning of many Leave supporters. Cocooned from responsibility, when things go awry, they immediately assign blame on others. This is why issues with the NHS are all the EU’s fault, despite the fact that France, Germany and the Netherlands all have wellfunctioning universal healthcare systems.
But surely the real world is a place where we have to learn to make compromises, to be challenged.
We have to acknowledge that every state is, in its own way, problematic. How solid can an identity be if it can’t handle criticism? These Leave voters need to get used to the fact that they have to engage with people with views that may be different to their own. These people may not even – wait for it – speak the same language as them. As the saying goes, no man is an island.
Great Britain may be an island, but the United Kingdom is not – it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland, and its dependency, Gibraltar, shares one with Spain. Right-moaners may shake their fists at the mention of ‘foreigners’, such as Turkish barbers and Polish interpreters, stealing traditional British jobs. They may require trigger warnings before having to set eyes on photos of French or German diplomats who have a hand in shaping policies that affect Britain. They may wriggle around the facts by mentally no-platforming forecasts of Brexit-related economic woe. But sooner or later, it becomes necessary to grow up and break out of the nationalist bubble. It’s important to learn to play, if not nicely, then at least respectfully with others.

Here’s an example of silly sensitivity that almost warrants a content notice: some Conservative MPs recently said that if the UK left the EU, on the day of leaving, the bell of Big Ben should chime in celebration. Naturally, I’m all for letting people love their country in whatever way they like at home and in privacy, but do they have to shove it in everyone’s face in public? What lesson might children take from such overt displays of patriotism? Indeed, if such sentiments continue, we face a whole generation growing up thinking that British imperialism is or was somehow natural.
It is time for such discourse to be put firmly aside: it is damaging not only for us, but for
future generations.

1932: The year Picasso had something to prove

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There are very few artists who could fill an entire exhibition with work created in a single year. Yet the Tate’s 1932 Picasso- Love, Fame, Tragedy centres on one year of Pablo Picasso’s life and career, a period of intense and exhilarating creativity in which he produced some of his most fêted works.

This vast collection of artwork is organised chronologically, with each gallery representing a progression through 1932. Every piece of work is labelled with the exact date it was created, emphasising just how astoundingly prolific Picasso was – masterpieces such as ‘La Rêve’ were churned out in the space of one afternoon.

The premise of the exhibition means that extraordinary pieces are interspersed with unspectacular experiments, providing the viewer with a tantalizing glimpse of Picasso as he is not often seen: warts and all.

This focused approach enables the viewer to chart the development of Picasso as an artist, in the context of developments in his personal life. By 1932, not even halfway through his career, he had already achieved international recognition as an artistic demigod. This was not an unchallenged status, however; Picasso’s determination to rejuvenate his work and reaffirm his reputation is palpable throughout the exhibition.

Although at the time retrospective exhibitions were unusual for living artists, Picasso curated his own in June of 1932. One gallery of the Tate’s exhibition recreates part of this original retrospective, which mixed art from various periods – early works, such as neo-classical paintings of his wife, are displayed alongside his Cubist ‘Seated Nude’ of 1910.

It was at this 1932 retrospective that Picasso’s wife finally recognised his infidelity. His young lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, is the heart and soul of the year’s body of work. Her distinctive aquiline nose and blonde hair reappear time and time again, immortalised in innumerable paintings, drawings, and sculptures. These works are permeated with unmistakable desire; broad and generous strokes of pencil and paintbrush form luxurious, undulating curves. ‘La Rêve’ depicts his lover in blissful slumber, whilst her head forms a phallus and her hands curl between her legs: transforming her body into a representation of the artist’s lust.

Whilst some of these nude studies are deeply intimate, many are somewhat disturbing. His series of Reclining Nudes manipulates the female body into fantastical, crude contortions, so that every side and orifice is visible. In ‘Sleeping Woman by a Mirror’, the face is seemingly slashed and gauged with paint, whilst her breast is flipped so that it forms a phallus emerging from between her legs. This visual language of violence appears most explicitly in the rare studies of his wife, reflecting marital strain, such as in ‘Woman with Dagger’.

This underlying darkness gains prominence as the year nears to an end. The last gallery, November and December, is dominated by images of drowning and rescue, based on Marie-Thérèse’s contraction of a serious infection after swimming in sewage-contaminated water. These are accompanied by depictions of sexual violence, revealing the artist’s troubled state of mind. It has been claimed that since the childhood death of his sister, Picasso felt cursed to inflict suffering upon women.

This unsettling conclusion to the exhibition perfectly highlights the significance of 1932 for Picasso, both artistically and personally. Marie-Thérèse  was soon to become pregnant, thereby ending his marriage to Olga, who subsequently moved away with their son. Meanwhile, fascism and Nazism engulfed much of Europe, paving the way towards another world war. Picasso described this as the worst period of his life; the so-called ‘year of wonders’ had undoubtedly come to an end.

Forensic scans show Oxford dodo was shot

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The iconic Oxford dodo – the world’s best-preserved specimen of the extinct bird ­– died after being shot in the head, researchers using a new form of CT scanning revealed.

Analysis of the particles lodged in the dodo’s head and neck show them to be lead shot pellets, the sort used to hunt wildfowl during the 17th century.

Source: Warwick University/Oxford University Museum of Natural History

The findings, reached through a collaboration between the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and WMG at the University of Warwick, challenge a long-standing consensus that the renowned specimen lived out its life as a show bird in London before arriving in Oxford in 1683 as part of the Tradescant collection.

In 1638, the writer Sir Hamon L’Estrange recorded a building in London where visitors could pay to see a dodo.

Dodos, native to the island of Mauritius, became extinct in the 17th century following the arrival of sailors and the animals that accompanied them.

Professor Paul Smith, director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and a member of the research team that carried out the scanning, told the Guardian: “Not many dodos made it from Mauritius live to Europe, so the natural assumption was that the dodo that you could pay to see in 1638 had died by 1656 and was in the collection of John Tradescant, and then came to Oxford.

“We thought we knew the history quite well, that is the reason why it was a bit of a surprise when we put the specimen in a CT scanner.

“In a way it raises more mysteries… If it was the bird that was in London in 1638, why would anyone just shoot a dodo in London?

“And if it was [shot] in Mauritius, which is I suppose marginally more likely, there is a really serious question about how it was preserved and transported back, because they didn’t have many of the techniques that we use in the modern day to preserve soft tissues – and we know it came back with its feathers and its skin intact.”

Source: Warwick University/Oxford University Museum of Natural History

The Oxford dodo is the only specimen which contains soft tissue, making it an invaluable resource for DNA studies.

The research team hopes to conduct further research on the shot, using chemical analysis to deduce where the lead came from.

Compulsory sport should stay in school

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It is the dead of winter. Snow carpets the ground. Somewhere, a whistle shrieks and a woman closely resembling a Staffordshire bull terrier barks orders at the shivering girls who are running laps around the perimeter of a large metal cage. One asthmatic girl lags behind and the woman descends on her. “Put your back into it!” she screeches as the girl struggles to contain her tears.

What is this dreadful scene I have just described? Is it a Siberian women’s prison camp? No, dear reader. It is just one of the many sports lessons I suffered through during my five years at a girls’ grammar school.

Time and time again, while I endured icy winds, driving rain and unflattering outfits, my PE teacher was snugly wrapped up in her thermal-insulated tracksuit. I wondered what heinous sin I had committed in my previous life to explain why I was going through this ordeal. The same words, drummed into me so many times, resounded through my head. Exercise is good for you! It boosts your endorphins! It decreases stress! It allows you to live longer!

None of this can be denied. In light of the current obesity crisis and the record numbers of students with mental health problems, exercise is perhaps more important than ever. But I’d like to suggest that forcing students to participate in sports against their will, and promoting ‘Sports Wednesdays’, as other universities do, is not the answer to our problems.

Let me get something straight: I don’t actually dislike exercise. I love dancing and cycling and going for long walks with my friends. But after enduring fourteen grim years of government-prescribed Physical Education, I never want to join a sports team again.

I can’t bear the thought of playing sport for ‘fun’ because I associate it with humiliation and misery. A long time ago, when I was a carefree Year Seven, this was not the case. In the folly of my ignorance I signed up to after-school athletics sessions. My reward for this was being forced to run around the athletics track three times with one other girl who had also happened to be ‘late’ as the aforementioned sadistic PE teacher stared at us and screamed like a howler monkey if we were slacking.

Everything associated with sport still has the power to make me shudder with horror, just as that PE teacher did all those years ago. The muddy-wet-grass-and-sweat smell of changing rooms, nauseatingly masked by Impulse strawberry spray; the insidious shuffling sound made by mats as they were dragged along the hall floor; the animalistic, murderous instinct I felt whenever I happened to be holding a javelin and saw the PE teacher walking past. All these experiences continue to evoke that feeling of horror.

However, this is more than just a personal phobia. I maintain that sport can be bad for our health. Forcing us to run through the snow was a health and safety hazard that would not have passed the risk assessment if the PE teachers had ever bothered to conduct one. In the summer they made us jump into a sandpit which smelled suspiciously like cat urine. Worst of all (if we weren’t so lucky as to have an ear infection or a period – yes, not having to do sports makes even periods bearable) we were forced to swim in a dated, lukewarm pool, a perfect breeding ground for germs, in which there was always at least one clump of hair and a free-floating used plaster. And it isn’t just school sports that are unhealthy: my brother’s friend spent so much time practising his bowling action as a child that he now suffers from scoliosis, while my mum’s midwife died falling off a treadmill. Really, they would have been better off spending their leisure time lounging on the sofa scoffing crisps and watching Fat Pets Fat Owners.

Not only this, but sport can have a detrimental effect on self-esteem. In swimming lessons, students who were constantly comparing themselves to their peers in class and on social media were suddenly lined up next to them in swimming suits which had the magical power to transform even the most stunning of supermodels into a blobby lump. And if this were not cruel enough, we were forced to wear swimming hats not dissimilar to the bald caps used for the rubber-headed aliens from Star Trek. Depending on our house colour, we looked like globules of snot, blood clots or bald chickens as we floundered around in the pool.

And that was just swimming. Can you imagine how it felt for the asthmatic girl in our class to be repeatedly told she was lazy? Or the girl for whom a new grade was invented because the PE teacher thought the lowest mark didn’t accurately reflect her tennis ability? The trope of being picked last for a sports team is often used in a humorous context, but its implications are serious: people are shamed for being bad at sports. The athletic children are at the top of the social hierarchy while the lesser mortals are left with burning cheeks and a feeling of inadequacy as they are sent to the team with the fewest people.

I know that what I have to say won’t convince everyone. Many people have fond memories of jolly days spent whacking lacrosse balls and lolloping gaily across the tennis lawn. Yet I beg you, please spare a thought in your smug happiness for those of us who skipped with joy when our final rounders lesson was over, who spent two terms stuck at the bottom of the class table tennis league, who are delighted to be at university where we can finally be free of all such tortures forever and get on with doing those things that truly interest us.

Café circuit: The Missing Bean

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When The Missing Bean came up in conversation with a friend, she immediately told me she found the coffee shop ‘sweaty’. Had I been holding my Missing Bean branded KeepCup at the time, I would definitely have been tempted to hit her with it – and if I had, it would absolutely have been deserved.

There is no better location for a coffee shop in Oxford than Turl Street, although an English student might say that one is necesary in their faculty. Luckily, The Missing Bean has branches in both of those locations.

Yes, the Turl Street windows might steam up when it is cold, but this is only because it provides warmth and comfort to anyone who needs a caffeine kick over work. In the summer, the windows provide lots of natural light and the opportunity for some great people watching.

The delicious selection of food make for a tasty treat at any time of the day. The toasted sandwiches, bagels, cakes and pastries are always fantastic – you can count on the Bean no matter what you want.

And let’s not forget the coffee. Not only is latte art gorgeous and incredibly Instagrammable, but their roastery on Magdalen Road provides the best blends out there.

Ignore anyone who says that JCT’s coffee tastes better – they have clearly never had the pleasure of sipping a flat white, while enjoying the very Oxford view of bicycles leant against Lincoln College.

Dominated by Lincolnites, laptop users and tourists, The Missing Bean is often very busy during term time and it can be difficult to find a spot to sit in. But this is just a testament to how unmissable the coffee, drinks and vibes are.

I once queued from outside the shop for a drink, and I can wholeheartedly confirm: I would certainly do it again – sweaty or not.

Working-class students pay more for university, NUS report says

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Working-class university students are penalised by a “poverty premium”, facing higher living costs than their peers, that makes maintenance loans insufficient for student survival.

The report, published by the National Union of Students (NUS), found that student expenditure routinely surpasses income from loans, and leaves many parents who cannot afford to subsidise their children without the means to pay for necessities like food and heating.

It suggests that accommodation fees are often unaffordable for those on maintenance loans, as many universities raise rents above inflation to generate income.

A freedom of information request by the University of East Anglia students’ union, cited in the report, found that more than 20 universities generated more than £1,000 profit per bed space a year.

One student said they had to find an additional £700 on top of their maintenance loan to pay for their accommodation.

In England, the top bracket maintenance loan for students living away from home outside London is £8,430 for the 2017-18 academic year.

“The report, titled “Class Dismissed: Getting in and Getting on in Further and Higher Education”, suggests that dropout rates from university are highest among working-class students, who are likely to be more concerned about debt than their wealthier peers.

This pricing policy risks segregating working-class students in lower-cost accommodation from others who have access to additional funds from their families,” the report states.

Another student voiced concern over the struggle to afford to participate in social events, being charged £200 to join a junior common room (JCR).

Access courses, which are run by many universities including Oxford to further equality in the sector, often require students to pay an additional year of fees to gain qualifications.

The report also suggests that working-class students struggle to find a guarantor to rent a property in the private sector, and are forced to use private schemes with higher interest rates and fees.

The NUS calls for an introduction of a minimum living income for students in further and higher education, and recommends the restoration of maintenance grants, the education maintenance allowance (EMA), and NHS bursaries for healthcare students.

The West needs to focus on the act, not the method, of killing

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The recent strike on Syria sits upon a long-established pedestal of western intervention, based on technological superiority and moral certainty, and an apparent inability to actually change anything on the ground at all, beyond significantly denting it.

The moral fibre implicit in preventing the use of chemical weapons may be admirable and applaudable, but this retaliatory gesture was neither of those things. In fact the recent missile strike was an incredibly expensive assuaging of guilt for all of us in the west, and at the price of a British industry built cruise missile it’s one this government is willing to pay, at the expense of however many Syrian lives of either or no side it will undoubtedly cost.

Western powers and the UK specifically, chose not to intervene in the civil war three years ago after lengthy debate. At this point Russia was not involved, the rebels held ground in several major cities and were in a sustainable position. Rightly or wrongly it was decided we would not act. Yet Obama’s (later abandoned) red line on chemical weapons was then, as it has been today, seen as a moral standpoint which, in our Western epistemology, seemed credible. Essentially the West’s line went (and goes) something like this:
‘We won’t intervene unless innocent people and people fighting oppression are killed really, really horribly, rather than just through the everyday brutality of barrel bombs and snipers.’

Of course last time chemical weapons were used the red line wasn’t actually enough. Given that it was crossed without rebuke, it seems we’ve apparently tried to ignore Syria and all of its horrible discontents. We’ve all seen but scrolled past a news story about an embattled siege, an aid convoy held up and plundered of much needed medical supplies to prevent the recovery of civilians or fighters, or changed channel or looked away as a report of heavy civilian losses in a Syrian city, like any city in Britain, is pulverised from the air by its own government. We have chosen to ignore these under the precedent that it’s war, it’s a civil war and on some basis, we can allow these abject crimes against civilian populations because they are inflicted with the more mechnical materials of steel and high explosives.  

However, it seems using chemical weapons is different, a war crime using these is a war crime worth half-heartedly ticking off with a few choicely picked specialist centres and shady looking science buildings. Chemical weapons are of course illegal and a cruel and indiscriminate form of killing and their use in the world is against everyone’s interest. But in this theatre of war to suggest that their use somehow crosses a line now worthy of our attention is symtompatic of distorted Western standards that scrutinise the principal means of killing rather than the principle of killing itself. We are loathe to look at the appalling suffering of people far away unless it breaches some level of suffering which acts as a threshold to our guilt and concern. Personally I don’t think such a threshold exists in Syria, where such high levels of systematic violence and cruelty has taken place daily for so many years without outcry.

Evidently the last straw for us isn’t that innocent people are killed every day. This is ostensibily within the apparent boundaries of mechanical war-civility. Because in fact these deaths are implicitly acceptable if we retaliate against the use of chemical weapons while ignoring all other war crimes that have taken place in Syria. The strike assuaged the moral guilt of war crime by chemicals, while implicitly condoning war crimes by other means as they have gone unchallenged. This isn’t an argument for more strikes or missed strikes, indeed intervening in a conflict now so marred in international tension is a deeply questionable move and one that should require better justification than a ‘principle of the thing’ reaction that showed no concern for the cost of human lives but only the method of their loss. It isn’t a call for anything, it’s a questioning of what we now mean when we intervene in Syria what are the implicit statements behind our bombs?
If the West genuinely desired to prevent the deaths of people through the use of chemical weapons they could have struck at those stockpiles when they found them, not waited a week or so from the Douma attack. They chose not to. We chose to strike against the use of chemical weapons rather than the killings they exact. The strikes demonstrate that the US, Britain and France cared enough to not be recorded as failing to act on the use of chemical weapons, but did not care enough to prevent either their use in the first place or act to condemn or discipline (diplomatically or otherwise) any non-chemical war crime in Syria.
It shows that we are prepared to symbolically intervene when the grotesque violence shown on Western newsfeeds exceeds an agreed level of cruelty. These strikes attacked only the type of weaponry available to a dictatorship engaged in murdering of its own people. They might well have ‘sent a message’ but they were of no help to the cause of basic humanity that we have consciously let wither in Syria until, eventually, the means of civilian murder was too much to bear for our weary eyes watching the News at Ten.

Keble ‘celebrate diversity’ with new portrait

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A new portrait of the first student of African-Caribbean descent to be elected president of the Oxford Union has been unveiled at Keble College.

Sir James Cameron Tudor, who was president for Michaelmas 1942, is an alumnus of the college, where he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

He went on to become a prominent Barbadian politician and a founding member of the country’s Democratic Labour Party in 1955 – which led the country to independence in 1966.

The warden of Keble, Sir Jonathan Phillips, said it showed the college’s “wish to celebrate the diversity of its alumni and student body”.

He said: “The college is very pleased that the achievements of such a distinguished individual are being recognised in this way.”

Tudor also led Keble’s Junior Common Room committee for a period during the war, where the college was requisitioned for war purposes and students re-housed in other colleges.

The portrait was unveiled to mark St Mark’s day, which also marks the date of John Keble’s birth in 1792 and the laying of the Keble Foundation Stone in 1868.

The art of painting like a child

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“It took me four years to paint like Rembrandt, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” This declaration by Picasso is reflective of a synonymy often bestowed between creative freedom and childishness. Coming from an artist whose genius is now near-universally acknowledged, the philosophy seems a wise one. It’s an oft-cited idea, after all, that someone who has mastered their craft can make it seem as effortless as a child would.

But this idealisation of childlike freedom in the creative process overlooks the natural penchant many of us have to judge a work by its perceived skill.

In 2015, a viral news story circulated surrounding a modern art installation in Rome that had to be shut down for three days because cleaning staff at the Museion Bozen-Bolzano mistook the exhibit, which consisted of empty champagne bottles and party poppers, for rubbish and binned it.

Upon discovering the mistake, museum staff hastily retrieved the parts of the exhibition from the bin and reassembled it, but less easily cleaned up was the dialogue the incident sparked about the role of modern art.

Many saw the incident as a kind of vindication for their inability to understand how something so easily misconstrued as garbage, a mess a toddler might have made, could possibly be presented as art. It’s a frustration many have probably echoed when looking upon paintings hung in galleries, paintings that appear to be no more than two swatches of colour splattered across a canvas.

Such criticism of an apparent lack of skill is not limited to visual art; the relatively recent phenomenon of ‘insta-poets’ such as Rupi Kaur, Lang Leav, and Nikita Gill who have garnered popularity by posting their poetry to various social media platforms have, amidst their fans, drawn some skeptics. These people claim that the poems are more the product of a few clichéd nature metaphors and some aesthetically motivated use of the enter key in formatting their pieces as opposed to actual feats of literary technique and artistry.

More often than not, people make at least a mental differentiation between ‘authors’ and ‘children’s authors’. Two people may both be voracious readers, but if one person reads mainly canonical works whereas another favours young adult novels, typically only the former will receive any kind of intellectual credibility for it. The fact is, there appears to be a pervasive social disdain for anything we perceive as ‘easy’. As much we like to say that all art is subjective and meant for self-expression, there’s a reason that the concept of being ‘cultured’ is considered synonymous with sophistry and some fundamental intellectual or social sense of superiority. We want, on some level, art to do something we cannot.

What’s the point of going to look at paintings we think we could have easily recreated, of reading poems we could imitate in a second?

Try questioning an adult’s enthusiasm for a franchise such as Harry Potter or Star Wars – chances are, the phrase “it’s not just for kids!” will at some point be thrown up in defence. The idea of enjoying something at all linked to childhood is apparently inherently shameful.

But the fact remains, however much we may appear to want our culture to be suitably highbrow and difficult, there’s still an emotional appreciation for works with the air of childishness threaded throughout our cultural consciousness.

Of the Top Ten highest grossing films of all time, seven (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Black Panther) can be classified on some level as “kids films”. Walt Disney Pictures, the bastion of childhood nostalgia for much of modern society, may be best loved for creating an iconic line up of Princesses and some classic sing-along tracks, but it’s also a studio that revolutionised the film industry. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first full-length animated feature film. Since the creation of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2001, twelve of the winners have been by Disney or Disney Pixar, and every single winner has been classified as ‘children’s entertainment’.

In literature too, there’s an inextricable fondness for children’s literature at large. Works such as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland have held their appeal as enduringly as Austen or Dickens, and the BBC’s 2003 survey “The Big Read” determined that the most beloved book in Britain was Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’, popular with children and adults alike.

We can accept Picasso’s ruminations on the value of childishness fairly easily, because no one’s refinement of taste is in question if they throw their hat behind Picasso. However, popular culture is popular for a reason, and it’s indicative of the overarching moods and tastes of society at a time.

We may hesitate to fully appreciate ‘childish’ things as art until they’ve stood the trials of time long enough to be deemed ‘classic’ or ‘vintage,’ but the fact remains, the freedom of creative exploration afforded by works that are unafraid of their childishness remains inherently appealing to us.

What is childish may struggle to be classified as great or even as real art in our understanding of what art is, but it’s appeal is untarnished, and perhaps its ability to inspire popular enjoyment and affection is what makes ‘childish’ art great in its own unique right.