Many great artists died in 2016: Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Paul Cox, Shirley Hazzard. It was a year of creative foment and as always, intense debate about the importance of the arts to a thriving, democratic society.
The MTV music video awards will be held on Sunday, putting this under-rated genre in the spotlight. Videos are inseparable from music in the digital age and the best examples deserve to be taken seriously as works of art.
The boxer’s death follows hard on the heels of David Bowie and Prince. The world is losing global icons and learning how to grieve using new and democratic tools.
From Beyoncé and Lady Gaga to Kanye and even Rihanna, pop royalty is crazy for high art. Is this a phenomenon worth celebrating or are pop stars mining the art world to gain credibility?
Lady Gaga and Lorde have both paid tribute to David Bowie in very different ways. Debating who did it better is rooted in an ideology of authenticity that pits rock against pop. In reality, Bowie embodied both.
David Bowie was not God, although for kids like me in the early 1970s he was the closest we ever came to believing in one. Neither was he perfect. For a long time there, back in the 1980s, just about everything…
Bowie’s life has been under the microscope since he burst on the scene in 1969 with the smash hit, Space Oddity. We examine how the divided city of Berlin saved this extraordinary artist at his lowest ebb.
Bowie’s fast-moving and ground-breaking ideas about sexuality and gender allowed millions of young people to come to terms with their sense of difference.