Marina Warner’s Free Thought
August 19th, 2008 by Steve BowbrickOn Radio 3 they’re having a sort of Summer season of short essays from 100 clever and/or important people. It’s all part of a real festival called Free Thinking that takes place in Liverpool at the end of October. In her contribution Marina Warner talks about the commodification of art and concludes (in two minutes flat) that the visual arts are less commodified than writing. Clever and persuasive. The other essays are all here. Contributors include: Phil Redmond, Stuart Maconie, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Germaine Greer and quite a lot of very interesting people I’ve never heard of (MP3).
Worth noting too that Radio 3 will most likely chuck the whole lot away once the festival is finished since that seems to be standard practice with the station’s speech output: especially scandalous behaviour when you consider that this cerebral stuff must have a residual value of close to zero. Write to your MP or something.
August 21st, 2008 at 2:27 pm
It is crazy that these are only available in the UK and unavailable for download.
August 23rd, 2008 at 2:04 am
You’re right. Insanity. There is NO RATIONAL REASON to withhold this stuff from an international audience and to block downloads. In fact, the series would be a perfect candidate for a podcast. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to hijack all the audio and host a torrent somewhere isn’t it?