Broken Oars Everything Changes and Technology Changes Everything Series: A Formula for a New Art, the Urban City and Victorian Hypocrisy #3

After a week away in the North Yorkshire Dales recuperating, your favourite Northen One returns with part three of this autumn's deep dive into art, paintings and songs about poo.

 

In this episode, we'll talk and learn all about how William Frith's work spawned a craze for 'representative' scenes of modern life, why the term post-modernism is adolescently arsy, pictures as 'texts' to be read, and the commercial possibilities that occur when the 'vulgar mob' (F.W. Fairholt) sees itself positively expressed in your work - which is why critics don't know what they're talking about, Oasis sold more than Blur, and the sound of the sixties wasn't Dylan but Helen Shapiro and Englebert Humperdinck.

 

We touch on Victorian hypocrisy by noting that all ages are caught between their public faces and private actions, point out that all children are legitimate, mention Harry Clasper again, and come to the birth of the cities that still inform our view of Britain.

 

And Mancunian exhibitionism.

 

There's no exhibitionist like a Mancunian exhibitionist.

 

Look up Frith's The Railway Station (1862), Many Happy Returns of The Day (1856), and For Better, For Worse (1880), George Elgar Hicks' The General Post Office, One Minute To Six (1860), and William Logsdail's The Bank and the Royal Exchange (1887).

 

Take notes. 

 

And buy us a coffee.