The sonic visions of Oliver Beer

Plus: how to paint with AI

Get more great writing every day – from just £1 a week

Oliver Beer talks to Arjun Sajip about making art that resonates

For the last 18 years – throughout his career, in other words – the British artist Oliver Beer has been highlighting the harmony between music and physical spaces. 'Any space that's empty and reflects sound has a musical resonance,' he tells me as we speak at his home in Lambeth. 'If you sing a particular note, you can tease out the resonance in such a way that you can no longer hear your own voice. It's very elemental and very simple. But what's crazy is that even though it's universal, and can be tried anywhere in the world, architects and engineers don't learn about it. They know the resonance frequency a bridge needs to stop it from breaking, but they aren't taught that every time they build a room, they're building a musical note or a series of musical notes.'

Read the full article

Maxwell L. Anderson calls for more resolve from US cultural leaders

Trump's first administration limited its attacks on unfettered cultural expression to mandating 'classical architecture' for federal buildings, a misbegotten edict that was frustrated by the long timelines involved. The second Trump administration is putting significant energy and resources into attacking universities and museums, believing them to be strongholds of liberal attitudes and liberal supporters. By withholding hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funds for academic research, the White House has decided that the benefits of scientific enquiry are dispensable, but the fealty of university administrations is essential. The president's effective appointment of himself as chair of the Kennedy Center on 12 February is both ridiculous and part of a process of bringing cultural institutions into line.

Read the full article

David Salle talks to Michael Delgado about painting with the help of AI

'At a certain point in time, oil painting was a new technology. It was the invention that allowed painters to actually express what they were seeing. I'm not saying that AI is that kind of invention exactly – it's obviously an invention of a different order, because it's not something which was invented for painters. But the question is: can painters use it in a productive way? And what would the non-productive way look like? And what are the dangers of that? I'm tempted to say that the dangers are just the dangers of making bad art.'

Read the full article

Will Wiles on the utterly compelling art of Suzanne Treister

It's very hard to talk about Suzanne Treister's Hexen 2.0 without sounding like a crank. That might be inevitable, so I might as well embrace it. Hexen 2.0 isn't simply adjacent to conspiracy theories, arcane knowledge and secret histories, it's in whirling union with them. Adding to the crank-y vibe is the knowing resemblance to the crowded canvases and arcane private languages of outsider art. And Treister's work has a tendency to make wild-eyed converts out of people. I write these words under a print from Hexen 2.0, which hangs above my desk and is a little hard to describe succinctly. It's a sort of occult schematic with figures from science, technology and counterculture – such as Tim Berners-Lee and Stewart Brand – arranged in a pentacle and orbited by a concentric system of scrawled text relating the history of the internet and the military-industrial complex, in a constellation of intelligence agencies.

Read the full article

Debika Ray on the gathering of the design world in Milan this week

Milan is the self-proclaimed 'home of design'. The billboards tell you this when you land at the airport, as do the queues snaking around its elegant streets and the surge prices on Uber during the five-day Salone del Mobile, the world's most important furniture fair, which has been running since 1961 and anchors the wider revelries happening across town during Milan Design Week, otherwise known as Fuorisalone. At this time of year, the city's dual identity as a cultural behemoth and commercial engine is laid bare and it pulses with an air of celebration, drumming up hype for design as a public-facing creative endeavour.

Read the full article

In the current issue…

Jane Morris looks at the stalling market for women artists

How much all the column inches, conferences, Instagram posts and exhibitions devoted to women artists are translating into sales is a moot point. At London's major modern and contemporary evening auctions last month, works by women were thin on the ground. Six of the 51 lots in Christie's sale and a further six of 31 at Phillips were by female artists, and just two of Sotheby's 40-lot evening auction – a meagre 11 per cent of the total. (Sotheby's, it should be added, set its only artist record of the evening with the £5.4m, including fees, made for Lisa Brice's After Embah, 2018.)

Read the full article

In the next issue…

More from Apollo

Current issue | Advertise | Podcasts

View this email in your browser

Follow us

Apollo Magazine, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP.
All Articles and Content Copyright © 2025 by Apollo Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe at any time.
To ensure our emails are delivered to your inbox, please add Apollo to your email address book and safe-sender list.

ALL NEWS MAG

The sonic visions of Oliver Beer

Commentaires

Enregistrer un commentaire

Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

Jolly guy's laugh is so contagious that even chickens had to join in

Chris Froome sends out strong message to his rivals as he storms back to win Criterium du Dauphine for the second time

Kid draws a hilarious family portrait, featuring his mother on her period