Leonardo da Vinci is a constant of the Western cultural tradition. We grow up with a vague sense of Leonardo’s achievements, knowing him to be a general titan of art and science. Our cultural attachment to Leonardo, however, has expanded beyond the individual himself. In the mid-sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari writes voraciously about Leonardo in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects . This mammoth   work offers Vasari’s take on the ‘great’ artists of history and his own time, thus marking the birth of art history as a discipline in the West. Vasari enjoys great and lasting political, cultural, and artistic influence. His book is dedicated to the powerful Cosimo de’ Medici, and his Lives discuss and pay homage to well-established Florentine and Roman artists. This political patronage solidifies a precedent of systematic exclusion that we continue to navigate in our own contemporary. Reading Vasari with a critical eye, we understand that his artist biographies conceal just as much as they reveal.   History itself is a creative, authored, and imperfect account of the past. In the essay ‘What Men Saw: Vasari’s Life of Leonardo da   Vinci and the Image of the Renaissance Artist’, art historian Patricia Rubin supports this claim. She writes, ‘Renaissance biography was a commemorative art. Its aim was to preserve and to exalt the names and deeds of worthy men in order to provide examples, both of actions and of their rewards’.[1] The Leonardo that we are introduced to and encouraged to remember is necessarily a mythologised version of Leonardo, prompting us to ask how exactly Vasari codifies the myth of Leonardo through biography, and how we might continuously be rehearsing this myth.[2]   The career of Leonardo, the original ‘Renaissance man’, is too polyvalent and illustrious to digest at once. In this research paper, I will focus on Leonardo the architect, specifically in regards to the Château de Chambord (fig 1). I will consider primary sources such as Leonardo’s own writing on and sketching of architecture, alongside secondary sources which allege his involvement in the design of Chambord. The central question that puzzles art historians is the extent to which the architect Domenico da Cortona relied on Leonardo’s original sketches in his ultimate design and construction of the French château. My objective, however, is not to make any final claims about design origins. Rather, it is to consider the legitimacy of Leonardo’s association with the project, and examine the value we attach to individual achievement. How does the knowledge that the great ‘artist-genius’ himself may have been the mind behind Chambord affect our appreciation of the already awe-inspiring architecture? Does Leonardo’s relation to this architecture necessarily change what we see? To better understand these questions, I will engage with Vasari and Rubin, as well as other art historians such as Anthony Blunt, Ludwig Heydenreich, Patrick Ponsot, and Hidemichi Tanaka. In doing so, I hope more clearly to discern the relationship between Leonardo the myth and Leonardo the architect. Fig 1. Château de Chambord, France. Benh LIEU SONG, CC BY-SA 3.0 (disclaimer of warranties included), , via Wikimedia Commons (unmodified). . In his Lives , Vasari endeavours to elevate painting to its rightful place as an honorable liberal art, alongside grammar, rhetoric, and music. To do so, Vasari must distance art from its connection to manual labour and establish it as an intellectual pursuit, associated with divinity itself. Vasari’s affinity for melodrama comes across from the very start of Leonardo’s biography:   The greatest gifts often rain down upon human bodies through celestial influences as a natural process, and sometimes in a supernatural fashion a single body is lavishly supplied with such beauty, grace, and ability that wherever the individual turns, each of his actions is so divine that he leaves behind all other men and clearly make himself known as a genius endowed by God (which he is) rather than created by human artifice.[3]   In the soap opera that is Vasari’s Lives , Leonardo holds star status. Furthermore, Leonardo is an intellectual (‘Vasari’s portrayal of Leonardo, who is presented as a philosophizing artist’[4]). His art is so natural that it creates reality. He is a great man who is the creator and definer of his zeitgeist.[5]   Vasari explains away Leonardo’s inability to finish projects, arguing that it is a result of the artist’s unending curiosity. Leonardo famously only finished a handful of pieces in his career and although Vasari would have desired more completed pieces, he writes: ‘[T]he truth is that Leonardo’s splendid and exceptional mind was hindered by the fact that he was too eager and that his constant search to add excellence to excellence and perfection to perfection [is] the reason his work was slowed by his desire’.[6] As with all biography, the work tells us as much about the author as it does the subject. Vasari and his peers prize a certain heroic individualism and we must read his work within this context. If nothing else, the art historical canon is a study of imperfect practitioners who represent their imperfect realities. History, we are told, rhymes more than it repeats. As we explore the rhythm of the art historical canon, we unearth Vasari’s own biases and eccentricities riddled throughout his life of Leonardo.   Notwithstanding the author’s fingerprints on the work, Rubin argues that Vasari paints a lively picture of Leonardo, as a man we want to know and remember. She asserts that Vasari did ‘know Leonardo in ways that we cannot. Friends and acquaintances of Vasari’s … had known Leonardo and could supply their reminiscences. And there were certainly echoes of Leonardo’s words still to be caught in Florence in the 1520s when Vasari arrived there’.[7] Vasari’s extravagant and sometimes absurd tone is distracting, but Rubin reminds us that under the exorbitant layers lies a certain intimacy with Leonardo. Leonardo’s notebooks offer an insight into the artist’s perception of himself, but Vasari presents us with what ‘men’ saw when they turned their gaze towards Leonardo. Vasari’s contemporary cultural appraisal of Leonardo ‘is a fabrication, not a fiction’. Rubin goes on to write that ‘with Vasari’s biography, Leonardo entered history as a charming, complex and compelling character. He is associated with the highest goals of art and with the marvelous powers needed to investigate them’.[8] In his Lives , Vasari sets into motion the mythical Leonardo, who then marches across history, enchanting and engrossing us right up until the present day.   Complicating the narrative is intimidating and hard, but also enriching and essential. In her influential essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Linda Nochlin writes that ‘when we ask the right questions about the conditions for producing art there will no doubt have to be some discussion of the situational concomitants of intelligence and talent generally, not merely of artistic genius’.[9] Nochlin contends that we must question norms and deeply ponder why they seem natural and set in stone. When we do so, Leonardo emerges from under the shrouded veil of the artist-genius, into the light of a much more complexly interesting artistic and political network of collaboration and cooperation.   The myth of Leonardo casts its shadow across the Château de Chambord, a formidable castle nestled in the French countryside. Built between 1519 and 1547, Chambord is palatial. It is symmetrically bookended by rounded corner towers, with a roof forested by chimneys, turrets, and spires. In his 1952 article ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Francis I’, Heydenreich argues that ‘it is known that in the last years of his life, on the banks of the Loire, Leonardo da Vinci worked out for his royal master—no doubt Francis I’s request—a vast project for the amelioration of the Sologne’.[10] These improvements were to take the form of a château named Romorantin, for the king’s mother. In line with Vasari’s characterisation of Leonardo, Heydenreich describes the artist-architect as ‘the most universal of Renaissance artist-philosophers’, and continues:   This castle of Chambord as it was in fact built—enormous and fantastic—is perhaps the only ‘ideal architecture’ of the renaissance ever carried out. And the singularity of its conception can only be explained by the intellectual cooperation of two minds gifted with similar creative ingenuity: Francis I and Leonardo da Vinci.[11]   All this talk of universality and idealism is simultaneously born out of and feeds into the myth of Leonardo. Heydenreich merges the political and the aesthetic, contending that Chambord’s uniqueness could only be the result of a collaboration between the king (munificent patron) and Leonardo (celebrated artist-genius).   Tanaka, in ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Chambord?’, endeavours to determine what hand Leonardo had in the architecture of Chambord. Much in step with Heydenreich, he writes:   None of Leonardo’s surviving architectural plans is clearly intended for the château. And yet the initial inspiration for Chambord—for its square keep on a central plan, with four round corner towers and a spectacular double spiral staircase at its heart—could hardly have come from an ordinary architect.[12]   Both scholars agree that Leonardo had a hand in the design of Chambord, but they differ in the extent to which they discern this participation.   Heydenreich is convinced that the singularity of Leonardo’s genius establishes his clear and substantial role in the design. By contrast, Tanaka concludes that it is likely Leonardo drew up initial plans for Romorantin and that, after Leonardo’s death, Cortona took them up for Chambord and naturally modified them. Tanaka asserts that Leonardo ‘must have prepared [the plans for Romorantin] in detail, so it is entirely possible that his plans for that palace were closely studied and even adopted by Cortona for the new project replacing it’.[13] Blunt echoes Tanaka’s argument—an argument that emphasizes the layers of cooperative design that went into the ultimate design of Chambord. Blunt, in his seminal book Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700 , expresses skepticism of Heydenreich’s unwavering   commitment to his thesis being based on stirring yet ambiguous evidence. Blunt asserts:   [Heydenreich] maintains that Leonardo was responsible for the conception of Chambord, but the arguments in favor of this view are not quite conclusive. On the other hand, it is certain that Leonardo designed the château which Francis intended to build for his mother at Romorantin, for which drawings survive.[14]   Leonardo died on 2 May 1519, and the planning of Romorantin stopped abruptly. It is likely, however, that Cortona dusted off these drafts when he began his work on Chambord that same year. This possibility of Chambord’s cooperative design does not fit within the bounds of Vasari’s singular definition of greatness: the individual and original genius.   Let us take as an example the attic windows at Chambord. Tanaka postulates that the similarities between Leonardo’s drawings for Romorantin and the actual design of Chambord’s stately windows are no coincidence: ‘A window which Leonardo drew for Romorantin is very similar to an attic window at Chambord, in that both are rectangular and have scallop-shell pediments as well as three ornamental vases’.[15] Tanaka considers it feasible that Leonardo never intended to build the château at Chambord, but that his designs were nonetheless used as a guide to the younger Cortona for his great architectural masterpiece.   As time passes and we move further from the spring of 1519, it becomes increasingly difficult to completely solve this particular Leonardo-related quandary. Over the years, the château has been remodelled and restored, making it harder to trace the genius of Leonardo, if it was there at all in the first place. ‘Subsequent modifications in a more refined French style have obscured the original Italian design … making it all the more difficult to detect the hand of Leonardo’.[16] This possible ‘Frenchification’ of original Italian design (which would correspond with Francis’ efforts to strengthen central power in France and expand the French empire) may explain Blunt’s problems with Heydenreich’s claim. Blunt notes that ‘in its general appearance Chambord is entirely French and still largely medieval. The massive round towers with their conical tops could be matched in any fifteenth-century château’.[17] In this way, capricious history plays games with art historians, who are certain. In ‘Les terrasses du donjon de Chambord: un projet de Léonard de Vinci?’, Ponsot adeptly concludes: ’D’une certaine manière, tous ces constituants mal connus du passage du temps contribuent à rendre plus difficile encore l’interprétation d’une œuvre hors du commun’.[18] (‘In a certain way, all of these little-known elements of the passage of time contribute to making an extraordinary work even more difficult to interpret’.) Because of the uncertain factors of time and memory, it is almost impossible to demonstrate decisively Leonardo’s connection to Chambord.   We always bring ourselves to the act of interpreting. This reality is beautifully articulated by Peter Schjeldahl: ‘I like to say that contemporary art consists of all art works, five thousand years or five minutes old, that physically exist in the present. We look at them with contemporary eyes, the only kinds of eyes that there ever are’.[19] Our attempts to discern any obvious trace of Leonardo in the remarkable Chambord prove fruitless. Because we expect solidity and non-change, that fact the Chambord has been formed and reformed by history surprises us. As Rubin adeptly writes, ‘Leonardo was not only a subject of Vasari’s history. He was subjected to history’.[20] In our desperation to loosely attribute art and architecture to Leonardo, perhaps we are asking the wrong questions and losing out on the much more interesting possibility of an interconnected history. Instead of asking whether Leonardo was the architect of Chambord and trying to conclusively trace his singular and genius hand, we could ask how Leonardo’s work and thought contributed to the artistry of others. How were others shaped by the legacy of Leonardo, just like Leonardo, while undeniably talented and remarkable, must have been shaped by the artists before him? I am less compelled by great men than by the societies that cultivate and receive them. Vasari provides us with an intimate, albeit veiled, connection to Leonardo. Cortona’s connection to Leonardo is real and significant. By investigating and acknowledging the legitimacy of other people’s work, we begin to observe a more real image of Leonardo: what men saw and now what people continue to see. Ruairi Smith   In May 2021, Ruairi Smith completed her undergraduate degree in Contemporary Studies and French at the University of King’s College, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia, Canada. Next, she will study Art History at the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland. At the time of this publication, she is tree-planting in northern British Columbia—spending her free moments reading MFK Fisher and playing euchre. [1] Patricia Rubin, ‘What Men Saw: Vasari’s Life of Leonardo Da Vinci and the Image of the Renaissance Artist’ (1990) 13(1) Art History 34. [2] Janette Vusich, ‘Leonardo: a legend in his own time’ (lecture, The University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 16 January 2020). [3] Giorgio Vasari, ‘The Life of Leonardo Da Vinci, Florentine Painter and Sculptor (1452–1519)’ in Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects  (first published 1568, reissue edn, Oxford   University Press 2008) 285. [4] Rubin (n 1) 35. [5] Vasari (n 3) 290. [6] ibid 292. [7] Rubin (n 1) 39-40. [8] ibid 43. [9] Linda Nochlin, ‘From 1971: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ ( ARTnews , 30 May 2015) < www.artnews.com/2015/05/30/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists/ > accessed 9 March 2021. [10] Ludwig Heydenreich, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Francis I’ The Burlington Magazine (1952) 94(595) 277. [11] ibid 276, 285. [12] Hidemichi Tanaka, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Chambord?’ (1992) 13(25) Artibus Et Historiae 85. [13] ibid 94. [14] Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700  (Yale University Press 1999) 276. [15] Tanaka (n 12) 100. [16] ibid 85. [17] Blunt (n 14) 15. [18] Patrick Ponsot, ‘Les Terrasses Du Donjon De Chambord: Un Projet De Léonard De Vinci?’ (2007) 3(165) Bulletin Monumental 259. [19] Peter Schjeldahl, ‘The Art of Dying’ ( The New Yorker , 23 December 2019) < https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/the-art-of-dying > accessed 20 December 2020. [20] Rubin (n 1) 38.

Fig 1. Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi (Bronzino 1545, oil on panel, 102 x 85cm). Uffizi, Florence. Wikimedia Commons. accessed 14 June 2021. The Petrarchan ideal of beauty runs as a fortified vein through art history’s marble foundation. In his sonnets, the poet Petrarch idealises and idolises his object of desire, the beautiful and moral Laura. It is precisely here, in our reading of Petrarchan poetry, that we find the root of the blond and milky-white female sitter—a European standard of beauty that haunts us to this day. In his 1548 treatise On the Beauty of Women , Agnolo Firenzuola endorses this narrowly particular vision of the ‘beautiful woman’. Firenzuola’s writing stems from and contributes to the apparatus of canonical art history, where our ideals and standards are ratified in male-centric European societies and codified by male-centric European institutions. Agnolo di Cosimo, known to us by his sobriquet Bronzino, paints a strikingly distinguished portrait of a female sitter in his Lucrezia Panciatichi  (c 1540). As I assess Bronzino’s Panciatichi , I am convinced that the painter is under the influence of  Petrarchismo . I am equally convinced, however, that while Bronzino   may not break the conventions of ideal beauty, Panciatichi holds a firm command over her viewership and rejects the role in which she has been cast: object of desire.   In his dialogue, Firenzuola brandishes six essential qualities of ideal beauty. He asserts:   When a woman is tall, well-shaped, carries herself well, sits with grandeur, speaks with gravity, laughs with modesty, and finally exudes the aura of a queen, then we say, ‘That woman seems majestic; she has majesty’.[1]    Although majesty is a moral quality, rather than a bodily comportment, I am nevertheless able to picture Panciatichi fulfilling these majestic criteria. Bronzino paints Panciatichi centred and symmetrically upright—evenly lit as she refuses to be swallowed up by her shadowed surroundings. Along the balanced plane, to the sitter’s left and right, stand Roman columns, a nod to the order and rationality of antiquity. Within this grand setting, there is a certain grandeur in her posture and the symbols of wealth she wears. Panciatichi is draped in rose satin and burgundy velvet. The artist’s careful use of shadow creates delicate textural folds and shapes a delightfully luxurious puff and a fashionably rumpled sleeve. The manner in which she is dressed reflects not only Panciatichi’s social status but also her moral virtue. We gaze at an elegant, charming, and graceful sitter, imagining that she does indeed speak with gravity and laugh with modesty.   Bronzino’s smooth brushstrokes lend a balance and clarity to Panciatichi’s face. Her hair, tightly pulled back, is coloured in step with Firenzuola’s decree that ‘the proper and true color of hair should be blonde … tan, tending toward a darker hue, and two brush-strokes of this will be enough for us’.[2] The artist also matches the litterateur’s colour palette in Panciatichi’s lips. Her mouth is symmetrical, proportioned to the rest of her face and ‘hemmed by Nature with two lips that seem to be of the finest coral, like the edges of a most beautiful fountain’.[3] Below stretches her ivory neck. It is almost unimaginably long: ‘one likes a throat with very delicate skin, slender, long rather than short’.[4] Here, Bronzino inhabits Firenzuola’s ‘one’, further universalising the arbitrary female ideal.   We travel down the rounded slope of Panciatichi’s shoulders, along the contoured pleats of her dress, and our eyes rest finally on her hands. Her left hand sits lightly at the rounded edge of the armrest and discloses a wedding ring. Bronzino’s care in painting his sitter’s fingers meets Firenzuola’s criteria: ‘Fingers are beautiful when they are long, straight, delicate, and slightly tapering toward the end, but so little as to be scarcely perceptible’.[5] Panciatichi’s right hand keeps her spot in a book, a gesture which reminds me of Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait , where Anguissola too paints herself holding an open book. I am all too aware that Bronzino’s Panciatichi is likely in the midst of reading a prayer book, and the painter wishes to signal her religious piety. Still, I am happy for my Anguissola association. For just a moment, the unintending Bronzino is excluded from a secret that I hold with Anguissola and Panciatichi.   I keep returning to Panciatichi’s eyes. Bronzino opts to paint her facing the viewer, instead of in profile. Painting in profile is a common tool with which artists emphasise the female sitter’s modesty. Thus, Bronzino initiates our intense and intimate relationship with Panciatichi. There is a severity to her expression, an unflinching stillness that demands our attention and respect. Although the painting is a closed composition—Bronzino hems in his sitter on the canvas—I have the unshakable feeling that she is gazing out from the strictures of the ornate gold frame beyond me. In his privileging of sight, Firenzuola unsurprisingly prizes the eyes above all else. He writes that through the eyes ‘in which the noblest and most perfect of all the sense resides, through which our intellect gathers, as through windows of transparent glass, everything is visible’.[6] Panciatichi’s eyes are alert but she glazes past us viewers. If Bronzino’s goal is to render his sitter’s eyes ‘windows of transparent glass’ where ‘everything is visible’, he falls short. The beautiful Panciatichi does not shirk our judgemental attention. Rather, she subtly eludes her viewership all together. Her gaze incites a brief moment of insecurity: in our innate introversion as viewers, we are left feeling uneasy. Ruairi Smith   In May 2021, Ruairi Smith completed her undergraduate degree in Contemporary Studies and French at the University of King’s College, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia, Canada. Next, she will study Art History at the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland. At the time of this publication, she is tree-planting in northern British Columbia—spending her free moments reading MFK Fisher and playing euchre. [1] Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women (first published 1548; Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray trs, University of Pennsylvania Press 1992) 41. [2] ibid 41. [3] ibid 28. [4] ibid 60. [5] ibid 67. [6] ibid 26.

1. The fish are alright   Historically and presently, the United Kingdom has identified and presented itself as a maritime nation.[1] Fisheries, historically a significant source of employment, cultural identity, and economic output, are a vital component of the UK’s seafaring character. Amidst the decline of other British coastal industries, fishing, also in a state of ‘managed decline’,[2] is perhaps the UK’s final remaining material link to this maritime heritage.   Our article posits that the interplay of fishing, national politics, and British international affairs over several centuries engendered a fishing iconography rooted in place, power, and identity. Fishers, fishing communities, and the political class gained differing utilities from this iconography. Even as the industry’s size and productivity has declined (to 0.02% of the economy)[3] and knowledge of fishing’s adverse environmental impacts has become widespread, fishing iconography remains germane to major events in contemporary British politics.[4] We use EU membership generally, and Brexit specifically, to highlight how conceptions of national identity influenced by the fisheries-politics-law nexus can ‘bite back’ to shape the activities of a political class instrumental in affording fisheries this power in the first place.[5]   Brexit is an example and an outcome of these interlocking forces. Since the UK joined the European Union in 1973, fishing policy challenged key British constitutional principles, and precipitated UK-European conflicts. This fomented pro-Leave rhetoric and ultimately directed the course of Brexit (2016-20) and the Transition Period (January-December 2020). Yet Brexit may also prove to be a critical juncture in fisheries policy, as it offers the UK an opportunity to break from perversely subsidised and unsustainable path dependencies that defined EU-era UK fishing policies.[6]   We proceed as follows. §2 articulates a historical and material foundation for British fishing iconography, arguing that it arose from the fishing communities’ socio-economic and political activities to become part of British national identity writ large. We characterise this as a romanticised national iconography of fishing as a noble, distinctively British profession. In §3, we consider the implications of this by examining how fishing iconography was effectively deployed by sections of the British political elite to capture national attention during the referendum campaign, before assessing how fishing directed political events during Brexit. Having evaluated the past and present of British fishing, §4 turns to the future. Building on previous work by marine scientists, we highlight pathways to recast extractivist fishing iconography as an iconography of flourishing marine ecosystems conserved in service of public welfare interests.[7]

auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant (To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.) —Tacitus, Agricola Despite having a democratic constitution, Belarus has never been a democratic country, before or after the 2020 presidential elections. This has not stopped the authorities stating otherwise.   Alyaksandr Lukashenka came to power amid post-Soviet nostalgia and maintained the rhetoric of a ‘welfare state’, insisting that prosperity is more important than respect for civil rights. Continuity with the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic became a part of the official discourse. After coming to power in 1994, he initiated the restoration of Soviet symbols as the official symbols of the Republic of Belarus—they replaced the historic white-red-white flag and the ‘Pahonya’ coat of arms, which have been state symbols since 1991.[1] Soviet-style administrative and ideological structures, including the KGB, continue to function in the country.   A period of press freedom began following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, but it ended in late 1994 when Lukashenka, who had just come to power, began to interfere in the work of the media. At that time, a lot of newspapers printed blank spaces instead of the report of MP Siarhei Antonchyk on corruption in the circles of the new president. The presidential administration banned the report’s publication in state-owned media, which had previously enjoyed fairly major editorial freedom.[2] Since then, the government has aimed at limiting press freedom, constantly tightening legal restrictions on the activities of journalists and the media. The Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) appeared in 1995 to address precisely these government actions, since the Soviet-tradition Belarusian Union of Journalists was unable to defend independent media representatives.

Becky Shaw is a Senior Associate at Boodle Hatfield in the firm’s art law and commercial litigation teams. She has worked on cases including  The Creative Foundation v Dreamland Leisure Limited and Others  [2015], one of the first cases to look at ownership of street art and what it means for property laws. In this interview she talks about why she and Rebecca Foden set up the  Art Law & More blog, what working through the pandemic has been like for the art world, and what emerging from it could look like.   Rebecca Foden is a Senior Associate at Boodle Hatfield. Although her practice spans many aspects of commercial litigation, she has achieved professional recognition in her work in art law, including working on the Caravaggio case  Thwaytes v Sotheby’s [2015]. In this interview, she discusses setting up the blog  Art Law & More , the changes the pandemic has wrought on the art world, and why sharing this information not only with professionals but the public at large is important.   Becky Shaw and Rebecca Foden, senior associates at Boodle Hatfield, are highly experienced art lawyers. Shaw has worked on the return of the Banksy mural  Art Buff  to Folkestone. Foden specialises in art litigation, and was involved in the well-publicised Caravaggio case Thwaytes v Sotheby’s .   Boodle Hatfield was founded in 1722, but its respectable heritage has not stopped it innovating. Shaw and Foden founded the Art Law & More  blog, and during the pandemic it has let their firm stay   in contact with the wider art scene. Shaw and Foden have both written long-form legal pieces for their firm’s website, but when I spoke to them on Zoom, they emphasised how the shorter, less technical nature of blog posts lets them publish more often and on more topics. The blog, along with its Twitter and Instagram accounts, has let them connect not only with people looking for legal information, but also with artists, auctioneers, collectors, students, and casual browsers.   Shaw recalls that they were inspired by similar blogs, like the Art Law Report  blog run by American firm Sullivan & Worcester.[1] However,  Art Law & More  focusses on English cases and news, and features   specialist contributors from the art world. These include museum professional Rachel Feldman and art historian Jasmine Clark.[2] Contributors write up much of the news section, but also contribute wonderful extras. For example, the ‘Strawberry Hill Treasure Hunt’ series followed art historian and provenance researcher Silvia Davoli as she prepared the eccentric Strawberry Hill House, built by Horace Walpole, for the ‘once-in-a-lifetime exhibition’ ‘Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill’.[3] Walpole had a large furniture collection, but it had not been seen since it was disassembled and sold in 1842. The 2018–19 exhibition gathered its components and reunited them with Walpole’s house. Art Law & More  provides information for any readers who believe they own furniture from Walpole’s collection, and the posts from the series will interest both future researchers and casual browsers.   The blog’s Instagram page has been used to advertise Boodle Hatfield’s arts sponsorships. For example, the firm has funded a prize for the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair since 2019.[4] In 2020, the firm was able to present it in person, but in 2021 it had to do so online, and its established online platform became very useful. The Art Law & More  Instagram showcased the prints, including Maite Cascôn’s Tricksters Tree I , and the blog published interviews with printmakers shortlisted for the prize, including Virginia Bridge and Jake Garfield.   The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the art world. Rosie Adcock, another member of Boodle Hatfield’s art law team, was seconded to the Royal Academy’s legal team and has continued to assist them remotely with pandemic-related issues. Shaw is a trustee to the De Morgan Foundation, an independent charity that displays and cares for the works of husband and wife William and Evelyn de Morgan. William De Morgan was a member of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts circle, while Evelyn is best known for her spiritual, feminist Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Like many other art organisations, the Foundation had money problems as a result of the pandemic: it struggled to secure loans, and it was forced to cancel exhibitions. However, it was helped by ticketed online talks, which gathered speakers and viewers from all over the world.   Similarly, Art Law & More  let Boodle Hatfield maintain its connections when in-person and informal meetings became impossible in March 2020. It did so through a series of interviews with notables of the commercial art world, called ‘A View from the Market’. The interviews have become a time capsule from ‘Lockdown One’, especially from April and May 2020, and Foden has enjoyed seeing whose predictions were the most accurate. For example, Sarah Hardy, curator-manager of the De Morgan Foundation, predicted that the digital art audience will remain powerful after the pandemic.[5] It is highly international, and its members have been able to appreciate culture more in the pandemic than they would have otherwise. Her prediction is probably accurate.   Online platforms have never been more important than during the pandemic. Jet-setters have found themselves grounded, and interior decorating and auction houses have provided a source of entertainment. One of Foden’s clients has had unprecedented success selling soft furnishings and antique rugs. Online auction technology has advanced rapidly, but smaller auction houses have struggled, and even Christie’s has cut archive staff.[6]   The decrease in travel has dramatically reduced footfall in Mayfair, a hub of small galleries. The area’s exorbitant rents had already forced out the twenty-first-century art gallery Blain Southern in February 2020.[7] How many more will go under when the furlough scheme ends and Mayfair rents return? The market has been innovative in response to these challenges. Many galleries have discovered the value of online sales during the lockdowns, and many are considering whether rent, once an assumed cost of a business, is necessary. Yet for many people, looking at artwork on a screen or attending an exhibition on Instagram will never match doing so in person. Foden visited Cromwell Place, a stretch of townhouses in South Kensington that offers short-term exhibition spaces to rent. Such spaces are a compromise between the isolation of the online experience and the high costs of a permanent physical base.   Despite these successes, we look forward to the return of in-person exhibitions and interactions. These are foundational to the world of art law. However, even once normality has in some form been restored, spaces like Art Law & More  will prove new necessities. Esmee Wright, the interviewer, is a final-year undergraduate in Modern and Medieval Languages at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, specialising in medieval French and Russian. She has written and edited for a number of student and professional publications, focusing on the arts. [1] See ‘Art Law Report’ < https://blog.sullivanlaw.com/artlawreport > accessed 1 March 2021. [2] See ‘Contributors’ ( Art Law & More ) < https://artlawandmore.com/home-2/contributors/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [3] ‘Strawberry Hill Treasure Hunt’ ( Art Law & More ) < https://artlawandmore.com/category/strawberry-hill-treasure-hunt/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [4] Woolwich Print Fair, ‘Prizes’ < https://www.woolwichprintfair.com/prizes > accessed 1 March 2021. [5] ‘A View From the Market—Q&A with Sara Hardy, Curator-Manager at the De Morgan Foundation’ ( Art Law & More , 23 April 2020) < https://artlawandmore.com/2020/04/23/a-view-from-the-market-qa-with-sarah-hardy-curator-manager-at-the-de-morgan-foundation/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [6] Anna Brady, ‘Christie's closes access to historic archive due to staff cuts’ ( The Art Newspaper , 11 February 2021) < https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/dealers-and-academics-mourn-suspension-of-access-to-christie-s-huge-archive > accessed 1 March 2021. [7] Anny Shaw, ‘Blain Southern goes into administration as artists reveal debts owed by gallery’ ( The Art Newspaper , 25 February 2020) < https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/blain-southern-artists-reveal-debts-owed-by-closed-gallery > accessed 1 March 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to more than 176 million confirmed cases and over 3.8 million confirmed deaths. These numbers are likely dwarfed by the true rates of infection and death, which will remain unknown well into the future and will likely never be fully elucidated.[1] During this time, several countries have vied for the unhappy honour of being the worst affected by the pandemic, including Italy in early 2020, the United States through 2020 and early 2021, and most recently India in April and May of 2021.   The emergence of highly effective vaccines in late 2020 and early 2021 suggested some relief might be on the horizon. The optimism proved to be somewhat short-lived, as questions of vaccination and vaccine availability (not unanticipated, but now real) arose. India provides perhaps the most dramatic example: despite the initiation of vaccination programmes, India suffered a devastating second wave of infection and death in 2021 that eclipsed the relatively mild first wave of 2020.   With this second wave appearing to recede, and other parts of the world cautiously reopening, one of the most pressing questions related to the pandemic is surely whether we can exploit this respite and vaccinate as many individuals as possible, to delay or dampen future waves of SARS-CoV-2 infection. With this in mind, we can consider the total human population as either vaccinated or unvaccinated. Every individual whose status changes from unvaccinated to vaccinated represents a further step in controlling the pandemic. The unvaccinated group can in turn be divided into subpopulations of individuals who are involuntarily unvaccinated (for instance, because of being immunocompromised or lacking access to vaccines) and individuals who remain unvaccinated by choice. The latter group—comprising those unvaccinated by choice—may shortly become the main barrier to achieving the long-awaited herd immunity. The herd immunity threshold for any infectious disease is usually substantially lower than 100% population immunity. If vaccine- hesitant individuals can be persuaded to seek vaccination, it may be possible to acquire some form of herd immunity without needing to engage in the vastly more daunting task of persuading vaccine refusers to seek vaccination.[2]   In this essay I would like to examine some of the sources of vaccine hesitation I have observed amongst friends, family, and acquaintances in India. It would be preposterous to claim to speak ‘for Indians’ or provide a view on ‘the Indian experience’. Rather, I relate some instances—largely from my own experience of the pandemic in India— to illustrate the types of vaccine hesitancy that might be operating in India and elsewhere in the world. My hope is to frame my observations in such a way that they may be amenable to more rigorous survey studies that could elucidate the distribution of these attitudes. My general point is that there are numerous types of vaccine hesitation, and many of these differ quite dramatically (in kind and not just degree) from the beliefs characterising the anti-vaccine movement.

Fig 1. Sacred and Profane Love (Titian 1514, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. . The sacred’ and ‘the profane’ might sound, at first, like the sorts of technical terms intelligible only to theologians and religious scholars. On closer inspection, however, it appears that they mean vastly dissimilar things to people from many different walks of life. Not only do the words ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ appear in the titles of numerous paintings and orchestral and choral compositions, showing that the relationship between the two has been a topic of interest for artists and musicians alike, but the dichotomy has also been the subject of lengthy written treatments by anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers. The sacred-profane opposition is often considered to have its origins in the work of Scottish orientalist and Old Testament scholar William Robertson Smith, who lived during the second half of the nineteenth century.[1] Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, both students of Émile Durkheim, were among the earliest thinkers on the continent to build upon Robertson Smith’s research into the sacred and the profane, and indeed Durkheim’s ideas about how the two were interrelated, a subject covered in his groundbreaking 1912 study The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life , were profoundly influenced by the work his pupils had previously undertaken. Since then, British anthropologists Jack Goody and Edward Evans-Pritchard, and the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade have been some of the many academics to have investigated the sacred-profane opposition.[2] In more recent years, the phrase ‘sacred and profane’ has occurred in the names of everything from podcasts to documentaries on the Lakota Sioux.[3]   But although Robertson Smith may have been responsible for popularizing the dichotomy, in no way should we suppose, as Jan Bremmer does, that the opposition only originated around 1900. There is good evidence to suggest it had existed long before that. Lindsay Mann observes that the sacred-profane opposition underlies much of John Donne’s metaphysical poetry.[4] Moreover, Gregory Nagy has argued that, although the songs of Sappho and Alcaeus might seem worlds apart, what unites them is the logic of the sacred and profane.[5] Perhaps we should regard Nagy’s arguments with a degree of suspicion, however, since in neither Sappho’s nor Alcaeus’ poetry is the opposition between the two made explicit. It might be argued that such a distinction is implicit. But, even if this were the case, one could object to this mode of interpretation on the grounds that, rather than examining these poems in a manner sympathetic to the contexts in which they were composed, we are instead looking at them through the distorted lens of our modern scholarly preoccupations. We have no idea as to how residents of Archaic Lesbos conceived of sacredness or profaneness. Furthermore, it seems inevitable that, whenever one undertakes to reduce the content of a poem or other work of literature to a straightforward binary opposition, one ends up overlooking much of its richness of language, complexity, and profundity.   Literature aside, several paintings and musical compositions have also made use of the sacred-profane dichotomy as a structuring device. Amongst those artists and musicians to have taken inspiration from the relationship between the sacred and profane are: Claude Debussy, composer of the 1904 Danse sacrée et danse profane ; Benjamin Britten, whose last major choral composition, from 1974-75, was the Sacred and Profane  song cycle; and the Baroque painter Giovanni Baglione,   best known nowadays for his rivalry with Caravaggio and for his painting Sacred Love and Profane Love , which exists in two versions, exhibited in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie and Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica respectively.   Britten   The question remains, what makes one piece of music more ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’ than the next? In the case of Britten’s song cycle, a lot of it has to do with the lyrics. Britten selected and set to music eight short medieval poems, dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. It is believed he discovered the texts in Reginald Thorne Davies’ 1963 book Medieval Lyrics: A Critical Anthology ,[6] which was published a few years before Britten began work on Sacred and Profane . Scholars have chosen to divide up the ‘lyrics’ (another word for song) into two groups, the secular and the religious. This is because collections of medieval lyrics, such as those housed in the Harleian Library, are known to have included both secular and religious songs. Secular lyrics frequently had an instrumental accompaniment and formed the basis of many popular songs, including drinking tunes like the ‘Song of Lewes’. Religious lyrics, on the other hand, did not always have an accompaniment and were generally written for liturgical use. The ‘profane’ songs in the collection (nb here, ‘profane’ is being treated as roughly synonymous with ‘secular’) discuss topics such as love between man and woman, the joyousness of springtime, and the arrival of winter, while the ‘religious’ songs (which we might, in turn, call ‘sacred’ lyrics) concentrate on Christ’s Passion and, in particular, his crucifixion; in fact, the seventh lyric, Ye that pasen by , is written from the perspective of Christ as he gazes down from the cross, and urges onlookers to contemplate his suffering and sacrifice.   Debussy   If, then, the poems that Britten uses provide the key to explaining his collection’s title, what are we to make of Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane ? The two dances are joined together to form a single movement, lasting approximately ten minutes in total. Writing to Manuel de Falla in 1907, Debussy referred to the distinctive ‘colour’ of each of the dances, comparing the ‘gravity’ of the one with the ‘grace’ of the other. With the opening bars of the danse sacrée , Debussy is said to be creating an atmosphere of ancient   religiosity, an effect he achieves through a combination of almost medieval harmonies and chant-like phrases in the strings. It has been suggested that he is endeavouring to reproduce the sounds and character of Roman or Classical Greek music, and that he writes the harp part in such a way as to deliberately evoke that instrument from antique times, the lyre. The danse profane , on the other hand, is of a decidedly exotic character. In French, the adjective ‘profane’ often comes with connotations of earthiness and sensuality, and we cannot fail to be struck by the more ‘impressionistic’ and lush style of the second dance. The harp line, here, is especially redolent of Spanish music. It is also interesting to note in this context that the cross-strung harp is believed to have originated in Renaissance Spain. Along with the sea, Spain was one of Debussy’s great loves; its bright colours and rich, expressive music intrigued him. Many of the composer’s other works, as well, show signs of having been influenced by Spanish music, such as the piano piece La puerta del vino  and the three movements of Ibéria  (the second of Debussy’s three Images pour orchestre ).   But where did Debussy get the idea to write one dance which was ‘sacred’ and another that was ‘profane’? Does his familiarity with the sacred-profane dichotomy suggest that the opposition was more widely known about than we might initially expect? Or did the inspiration to write a piece about the ‘sacred and profane’ come from somewhere else, somewhere other than the intensely academical works of Durkheim and Robertson Smith? Perhaps Debussy was struck by a painting he had come across, maybe one that was even in Rome at the same time as he was living at the Villa Medici, where he stayed for a period of two years during the 1880s. Ultimately, this is pure speculation—to my knowledge, there is no evidence linking Debussy’s two dances with either Baglione’s Sacred Love and Profane Love or Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love . What this   article aims to highlight is the possibility of a connection between Debussy’s composition and one or both of these paintings. The Galleria Borghese, where Titian’s work is displayed, did not open until 1903, and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, where one version of Baglione’s painting is exhibited, did not start welcoming visitors until 1893, so in both cases the establishment of the gallery postdates Debussy’s residency at the French Academy in Rome.   But perhaps—yet more conjecture—he found out about them some other way. This is not impossible, nor is it inconceivable that seeing the painting(s) inspired Debussy to write a composition to do with the sacred and profane. In fact, we know for certain that one piece of music Debussy wrote, the symphonic suite Printemps , was inspired by his experience of seeing a painting by the Italian Renaissance master, Sandro Botticelli. The painting in question, Botticelli’s Primavera , graced the walls of the Villa Medici during the years when Debussy lived there, and it made such an impact upon the composer that he undertook to capture, using music, the exuberance and vitality of the characters represented on Botticelli’s canvas. Given Debussy had already used this painting as a source of inspiration for one of his compositions, what was there to stop him from using other paintings as further sources of inspiration? Of course, what this thesis of mine fails to establish is that it was a painting  that provided the inspiration for the title of Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane .   Baglione Fig 2. Sacred and Profane Love (Baglione 1602–03, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. . It remains for me in the concluding part of this article to sketch some of the major interpretative theories about Titian’s and Baglione’s ‘sacred and profane’ paintings. Baglione was, in addition to being an accomplished draughtsman and painter, an art historian. His 1642 book on the lives and times of artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Le Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori et Architetti , which contains biographies of Caravaggio, Carracci, and Orazio Gentileschi, among others, also has an entry about Baglione himself. There he explains how he made for Cardinal Giustiniani ‘two paintings of two Divine Loves, holding under their feet the profane Love, the World, the Devil, and the Flesh’.[7] This might be taken as concrete proof that the titles which the two paintings go by nowadays were the ones the artist always intended his artworks to have. It is commonly believed that Baglione meant Sacred Love and Profane Love  to be a response to Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit . Orazio Gentileschi’s deposition from the libel suit that Baglione later brought against Caravaggio certainly seems to suggest Baglione set out to rival Caravaggio so as to curry favour with the Giustiniani. Although we are hardly able to take Gentileschi’s testimony at face value,[8] not least because the information he gives is often imprecise or categorically wrong, we cannot doubt that Baglione was consciously imitating aspects of Caravaggio’s style, such as his dramatic use of chiaroscuro and the abruptness of presentation. Baglione’s painting has also been read as a visual accusation of sodomy against Caravaggio. The devil in the bottom left-hand corner of the Rome picture has frequently been identified as a caricatured portrayal of Caravaggio (nb we might observe how, by contrast, the face of the devil in the Berlin version is turned away). It could be, therefore, that Baglione is drawing attention to Caravaggio in more than one way, and in neither instance is he being particularly subtle.   Titian   If we turn from Baglione’s to Titian’s painting, the difference could not be more striking. While Baglione’s Sacred Love and Profane Love  is an agonistic painting, conceived as a retaliatory response by one artist to the work of another artist, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love  was commissioned to mark the occasion of a grand, aristocratic marriage, that of Niccolò Aurelio, chancellor in the city government of Venice, and Laura Bagarotto of Padua. An overview of some of the different interpretations of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love  will suffice to show the multiplicity of scholarly approaches to this most enigmatic of paintings. Walter Friedlaender drew attention to the connection between Titian’s work and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili ,[9] a romance by the fifteenth-century writer Francesco   Colonna. He hypothesized that the seated figure on the left of the painting was Venus, and the standing one on the right was Polia, a figure from Colonna’s narrative, who has recently joined the service of the goddess of love. Erwin Panofsky argued that the two women represent the Twin Venuses of Neoplatonic philosophy,[10] who personify transient and eternal love respectively. Eugene B Cantelupe, in turn, asserted that Titian’s painting is an exploration of the dual nature of love in Platonic philosophy and Christian doctrine. He believed Sacred and Profane Love  to be ‘an allegory of pagan-Biblical love’[11] and highlighted the complex symbolism of much of the painting’s iconography. For instance, Cantelupe regarded Adonis, whose sarcophagus we see in the painting, as a pagan prefiguration of Christ, in that just as Christ returned to life, so Adonis was resurrected, after having been killed whilst out hunting. Both Christ and Adonis, therefore, can be viewed as symbols of rebirth and eternal life.   The task of deciphering the meaning of Titian’s painting is made infinitely harder, however, in view of the fact that Sacred and Profane   Love  was not even the work’s original title, in all probability. The first mention of the painting occurs in a poem of 1613, where it is listed as ‘Beauty Adorned and Beauty Unadorned’. We cannot even be certain whether this was the name Titian used to refer to his work. What, then, is contained in the title of a painting? It is more than just a label. It is a description of that painting’s subject matter. Nor is it just that, for, as Paul Barolsky notes, ‘description is never mere description’, it is also implicitly interpretation.[12] So much of our understanding of Titian’s painting hinges on the particular title we use to describe the work. Not much is ultimately knowable or definite about Sacred and Profane Love , apart from the circumstances surrounding its creation. But in many respects this is what makes it such a captivating artwork. We must try our best to make sense of the painting’s complex imagery but, without the parameters of interpretation suggested by the work’s original title, the title given it by the artist, we can afford to be much freer in our ‘reading’ of the picture than might otherwise be the case. Who the two women in Titian’s painting are meant to be, no one knows. But what arguably matters just as much is who people think  they are. And the fact that we are still asking these questions, and still discussing this painting centuries after it was made, goes to show what a timeless and fascinating work of art Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love really is. Matthew Sargent   Matthew Sargent is a third-year undergraduate in Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Among his diverse interests are Greek historiography, literature, and political thought. He was the joint recipient of the 2020 Porson Prize, for Greek verse composition. He hopes to do an MPhil at Trinity, focussing on leadership theory and paraenetic discourse. [1] Jan N Bremmer, ‘“Religion”, “Ritual” and the Opposition “Sacred vs. Profane”’ in Fritz Graf (ed), Ansichten griechischer Rituale: Geburtstags-Symposium für Walter Burkert  (BG Teubner 1998) 25. [2] ibid 28. [3] Jack Goody, ‘Ritual and Religion: The Definitional Problem’ (1961) 12(2) The British Journal of Sociology 142; Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion  (Oxford University Press 1965); Mircea   Eliade, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion  (Willard R Trask tr, Harcourt 1959). [4] Lindsay A Mann, ‘Sacred and Profane Love in Donne’ (1986) 65(4) Dalhousie Review 534. [5] Gregory Nagy, ‘Lyric and Greek Myth’ in R. Woodard (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology  (Cambridge University Press 2007). [6] Christian Damon Stirling, ‘A Study of Britten’s Unaccompanied Choral Cycles’ (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2015) 106ff. [7] Maryvelma Smith O’Neil, ‘Giovanni Baglione - Seventeenth-Century Painter, Draughtsman and Biographer of Artists’ (DPhil thesis, Oxford 1992) 42ff. [8] ibid 44. [9] Walter Friedlaender, ‘ La Tintura Delle Rose (the Sacred and Profane Love) by Titian’ (1938) 20(3) The Art Bulletin, 320-1, 323-4. [10] Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks  (University of California Press 2000) 78. [11] Eugene B Cantelupe, ‘Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love Re-examined’ (1964) 46(2) The Art Bulletin, 224. [12] Paul Barolsky, ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ (1998) 17(3) Notes in the History of Art 25.

Michael Sandle RA is a sculptor and one of Britain’s foremost living artists. He is an outspoken critic of many facets of today’s art world, and has ruffled feathers in Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. He left the Royal Academy of Arts in protest in 1997, but was called back and has been referred to as ‘the living soul of the RA’. His artistic focus is on war, death, and destruction.   CJLPA : Your family home was bombed during the Second World War. Do you have any recollections of this? Has this incident affected you throughout your childhood and has it found its way into your work?   Michael Sandle : I remember very clearly the Second World War blitz on Plymouth when I was aged four to five years old. I wasn’t frightened or suffering any hardship and never saw a dead body, but I remember picking up my mother’s panic as we ran to the shelters. One was an Anderson shelter in a neighbour’s back yard and the other one was a large concrete one not far up the hill from Warleigh Avenue, where we lived. My mother claimed that we were machine-gunned as we were running to the larger one up the hill—could be embroidery on her part, although there was a row of holes in the zinc coal bin and shrapnel in our backyard. The thing that sticks in my memory the most is that after we had moved to the comparative safety of Bodmin (because my mother decided it was time to get out of Plymouth—she was right as our house got bombed) is that she had occasion to go back to Plymouth by train and she took me with her (I’d say this was sometime in 1942). As the train came into Plymouth station my mother pointed through the carriage window and said, ‘Look, Michael—that is where we used to live’. There was hardly a building left standing and I have never ever forgotten this scene of devastation. I am convinced that these memories are behind my interest in war as a theme and my interest in aerial warfare in particular. However, as the reverberations from the First Word War are still being felt as it was the beginning of slaughter on an industrial scale, and the fact that the Second World War brought about increased scientific and technical advance which has changed the lives of so many people, you would have to be rather dim not to recognise war’s importance and its obscenity.   CJLPA : War and destruction form a recurring theme of your work. I am intrigued by your design of the Belgrano Medal  from 1986, showing Margaret Thatcher with the inscription ‘imperatrix impudens’, which translates as ‘shameless empress’. The medal shows the Argentine Navy cruiser Belgrano  as it sunk, having been hit by a Royal Navy submarine  HMS Conqueror  in the Falklands War, with the loss of 323 lives. Who commissioned the medal and for what purpose?   MS : The Belgrano Medal , or ‘Medal of Dishonour’, was influenced by the superb German medallists of the First World War, such as Karl Goetz, in the British Museum. I saw an exhibition of these biting and extremely powerful medals and decided to try and do one myself. I then decided it would be a medal of dis honour. I did not know at the time that the American sculptor David Smith had also seen much earlier these very same German medals in the British Museum too and had decided to make some medals himself, which he also called Medals for Dishonor . They did not go down too well in America. For my medal, which had been commissioned on behalf of BAMS [the British Art Medal Society] by the then-Curator of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, Mark Jones (he said I could do whatever subject I liked) I decided on the sinking of the Belgrano , which seemed dishonourable to me—Margaret Thatcher with her arrogance was like a red rag to a bull to someone like me. There were questions raised about this medal, and Mark Jones could have been in a lot of trouble. However, he went on to be the Director of the V&A and is now Sir Mark Jones. Incidentally, a counter-medal was made against mine by a proponent of the Falklands War. Fig 1. Belgrano Medal—A Medal of Dishonour (Michael Sandle 1986). Courtesy of Michael Sandle. CJLPA : I love your 1999 proposal for the ‘Animals in War’ memorial, which sadly was not chosen as the final memorial for the location in Park Lane, London. It would have been a powerful public monument. Has it since been built in another location, or would you still go ahead with it in another location if the opportunity should arise?   MS : I put my heart and soul into the ‘Animals in War’ proposal but, like many competitions in Britain, I thought it was ‘stitched up’. The organisers appeared to have decided that David Backhouse was going to win as he was allowed to re-submit, which is normally unheard of, after seeing my proposal, which had a mule carrying a screw-gun going up some steps (I always do a lot of research)—so what does the Animals in War Memorial have but a mule going up steps with a screw-gun on its back! I have been shafted on two other occasions, I might add. In Germany you are not allowed to put your name on anything submitted, in order to limit favouritism, and the submissions are judged purely on merit. If another city or country even wanted to have my proposal realised, I would of course be delighted. Fig 2. Animals in War (Michael Sandle 2000, maquette wood and epoxy, 75 x 75 x 75cm). Courtesy of Michael Sandle. CJLPA : I remember when I first saw your sculpture at the Royal Academy Summer Show, titled Iraq—the Sound of Your   Silence  (2009, carved limewood), a Madonna-like mother holding a bandaged baby with a bag over her head. It was like nothing I had seen before. Can you talk a little about this incredibly powerful work?   MS : Iraq—the Sound of your Silence is only the second wood carving I have ever attempted. The first was as a 16-year-old studying at the Douglas School of Art on the Isle of Man. It was a small relief in elm wood and the subject was Pegasus. I wanted to do a more ambitious carving in limewood because I came to admire the German medieval masters when I was living and working in Germany. The subject—a mother holding a bandaged, wounded child—came from an image I saw on the internet which jumped out at me, and I had previously drawn the Iraq Triptych , pillorying Blair, which had on the right-hand panel a drawing of the British soldier Corporal Payne beating hooded detainees, whom he called his ‘choir’ because of their cries and to amuse his mates. He beat one of his victims to death. Anyway, in my Iraq sculpture, I deliberately gave it a resonance with a pietà as I find organised Christianity staggeringly hypocritical—as I do most politics, particularly when it comes to foreign policy.   This sculpture was one of the most taxing works I have ever attempted; it took ages to do. Originally, it was going to be something quite different when I started it in Germany, many years before the invasion of Iraq, as it was going to be another work based on Kali, the Hindu goddess of love and revenge. However, I left Germany, brought it to my studio in Devon, divorced my wife, and moved the unfinished mass of wood to my London studio. After seeing photos of the horror unleashed in Iraq, it suddenly became crystal clear what I had to sculpt, and Kali was no longer my subject. I had already made a sculpture related to her anyway, called the Queen of the Night . Fig 3. Iraq—The Sound of your Silence (Michael Sandle 2009, limewood, 180 x 140 x 90cm). Courtesy of Michael Sandle. CJLPA : Regarding art and social media, the huge number of artworks out there, what can one make out of that? The world of art has changed enormously since you taught at Karlsruhe (1980-99). What do you make of the chaos and speed with which the art world is moving, and its identity with the market? When art schools now take their references from the market, is there hope that we’ll ever come out of this?   MS : When I started off my career as an artist there weren’t as many artists or galleries—Winston Churchill might well have said, ‘Never in the history of mankind has so little art been made by so many!’ I was once asked by a journalist from The Times  for a quote about the work of the German artist Thomas Schütte, which was on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square at the time. I replied with, ‘It would look better outside of Specsavers’, which was duly printed. I got a wonderful email from an artist from ‘up north’ who said, ‘Thank God for you, Mike, standing up for us mortals against the blizzard of shite masquerading as art’—blizzard of shite indeed! Anyway, what I loathe about the present-day art world is how the artists I grew up with have been totally forgotten. Who talks of Frank Brangwyn or of Dame Laura Knight or of Muirhead Bone, for example? They could all draw. Terry Atkinson, who was a colleague of mine, said some time ago (but it is still relevant), ‘What matters today is how well you draw badly’.   It is not all doom and gloom—there are some real artists around, who are not part of the mainstream but don’t get much notice from the media because they are only interested in ‘celebrity’ artists who have come to the fore by the machinery of the taste-makers who decide what is in—not unlike a form of cultural Stalinism, where the rules are arbitrary but absolute. I am a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist and I think the West is decadent. As Gore Vidal opined, we are living through the decline of the American Empire. With advancing age, I seem to have developed the mindset of a taxi driver when I look at a lot of contemporary art—‘Do you call this rubbish art?’ I think to myself, ‘My two-year-old daughter could do better’. There are, though, two artists who have my greatest respect. They are Giles Walker, who is a brilliant animatronic sculptor and a scathing critic of post-Brexit, post-Thatcherite Britain; and Tim Shaw, who is an equally scathing commentator on the dystopian society we live in.   CJLPA : You were obsessed with the fear of death as a child. How does memory play into your work?   MS : My work is all about memory—in a nutshell it is about sex and death. It is true, too, that I was very obsessed with death as a child.   CJLPA : You call yourself a pessimist, distraught over the state of the world, yet you have a happy disposition. Is that because in spite of the way things are going in the world, you find yourself to be happy to be alive and in the company of people?   MS : I have already said I am a pessimist, but I do love my friends and would not want to be a hermit. I am very lucky with friends—the only downside is that as you get older you lose them through death, but I have a lot of younger friends too.   CJLPA : Are you a Romantic?   MS : Am I a Romantic? I suppose so but maybe I am too conflicted to be one—I am pathologically lazy most of the time and ridiculously neurotic. I think real Romantics would have to be surer about themselves. Alexander (Sami) Kardos-Nyheim, the interviewer, is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of CJLPA .

Rebecca Salter is a painter. She is President of the Royal Academy of Arts, the first woman in the role. She has a strong interest in Japanese woodblock prints.   Past and present leaders of the Royal Academy of Arts come together here to discuss the role and power of art in today’s world, and the difficulties and responsibilities of running an institution seen as the country’s cultural trendsetter. These conversations raise questions of ethics, artistic merit, and political compromise. CJLPA : What do you think about the current state of the world, and art’s part in it?   Rebecca Salter : I think for quite some years the art world has been becoming increasingly global and increasingly aware of its carbon footprint. It is predicated on massive growth and prices going up and up and up. I think what will happen now may change that—it will be more difficult for art sellers, probably for a while. So I think the money circus will slow down slightly. I hope it’s a good time to reassess.   CJLPA : Do you think that the pandemic will increase people’s interest in seeing art in person?   RS : I think so, partly because it will increase people’s interest in actually making, housing the made, and the whole process. Because people have had a huge amount of time on their hands, many have found themselves doing things which they never thought they would—making things. So I think there will be more of an interest in the physical object, and also that we will be so fed up with online by the end of the pandemic that we will just want to see the real thing.   I think we have realised there is a difference in seeing an object online. It’s a substitute for now, but nothing can beat the actual experiences of the object. In the object, you can feel the traces of the artist’s hand and as a result of that you can, to some extent, enter their head. I think we lose a lot of that when we look at things online.   There’s a Japanese term which translates to ‘your eyes sit’. It describes the difference between actively looking, on the one hand, and seeing, on the other. Your eyes relax so much that you almost disappear into the artwork because you’re no longer actively scanning it, you’re just ‘being’ with it.   CJLPA : Arts funding: a public or a private affair?   RS : As President of the Royal Academy—which of course gets no government funding—I think it’s a combination. We’re quite lucky in this country as we have a mixed model, wherein some places get government funding and are topped up with private funding. What’s going to happen after this I don’t know, because the government will be looking to reduce its support in all sorts of areas of life. One worries about the arts, because people always make the argument that they are not important and we don’t need them in the way we need roads and hospitals. I would argue that a country without any kind of cultural sector would be so impoverished it wouldn’t be worth living in.   CJLPA : The arts make life worth living in lots of ways.   RS : Exactly. But when you’ve got very difficult decisions to make, it’s not easy to make the case for arts funding when you’ve got schools, and hospitals, and paying back all this money we’ve borrowed over the pandemic. That’s going to be the crunch. Being more optimistic about it, I think that—again, during lockdown—people have recognised the value of the arts sector. So many arts organisations, including the Royal Academy, put stuff online very, very quickly. You could argue that by doing that—and by doing that for free—all the arts organisations contributed to the mental wellbeing of the country.   Nobody has figured out how to monetise the online offerings, because we’ve been effectively just giving them away for free. Just asking people to donate? But if more of what you do goes online at some point—and this is a question that comes up the whole time— how do you monetise art? I’m not sure anybody’s got the answer yet, but I also think that people who are fairly wealthy and are able to support the arts have, again, realised the importance of the arts during lockdown. One can start to have confident conversations with philanthropists, or potential philanthropists, about how they could support the arts. Because people during lockdown look to values in life and in organisation more closely than they might have done before, they want to support organisations that have values they agree with and they think are important.   CJLPA : In a revolution, statues tumble. Are we witnessing a revolution?   RS : I’m not sure whether I’d call it a revolution, but I think it’s always helpful to look at things again and reassess things. There are some truly egregious examples where statues should be tumbled, but in many cases I think it is much more important to have really good conversation about objects and their interpretation. I think if you’re not careful, the tumbling doesn’t actually achieve very much, except for taking something away. What you really want to do is add to the quality of the debate.   Look at how history has been interpreted. The Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition that has just opened at the National Gallery is incredibly interesting. For a long time, Gentileschi was sidelined almost completely in art history. There were some concerns that she was being exhibited at the National Gallery as a sort of token woman. But there is no way you could go around that exhibition and think she is a token woman. Her painting is unbelievably powerful, and by rights should have been in the canon right from the beginning. The exhibition wasn’t just run because she was a woman. She’s at last taken her rightful place.   CJLPA : How do you feel, being a woman in the art world? I know it’s a lot better recently, but I saw in Tate the posters of the Guerrilla Girls, and I thought about how they were making art not so long ago. I was always into art and drama. They are always labelled as very feminine subjects, whereas men are put towards maths and sciences. Some things have changed, but the art world is still quite male-dominated, for example in terms of salaries.   RS : There still are some very uncomfortable statistics about the art world. All the highest-paid contemporary artists are male. When I was at art school the gender split may have been close to 50–50, but I was never taught by a woman. All the teachers were men, and this applied to my cohort too. Courses with predominantly women are emerging, but there are still fewer women teaching, fewer women as career artists, and the statistics are very odd.   I fear it’s going to get worse. You need to spend some part of your week working for money, and then you need to find time to work on your art. The real pinch point is when you introduce children into that mix. Then, it becomes almost impossible, unless you’ve got an other half who is doing half the work. Quite a few of us older women Academicians don’t have children. Some of the younger ones do but it’s quite a struggle.   CJLPA : Planning your time is quite difficult as an artist, because you have to be immersed in what you’re doing.   RS : Yes, it’s tricky and time consuming. You can’t shortcut it and say, ‘I’ve only got an hour’. But there are more women, and we’ve elected more women at the Royal Academy in the last ten or so years, so the balance is changing.   CJLPA : You were the first female President. Congratulations!   RS: Thank you! It only took 252 years, but we got there in the end. Shockingly, the Royal Academy had two female members when it was founded in 1768, but then the next woman was elected in 1936. That tells you what the nature is of the organisation. Of course, the irony is that—as so often happens— it’s a woman in post when all the sweeping up has to happen, which of course is what’s happening with the pandemic. I get to do all the hard work.   CJLPA : Institutions such as the Royal Academy are the shapers of taste. How did you view this responsibility during your time as President?   RS : I think the Royal Academy might be flattered to think it is a shaper of taste, really! The wonderful thing about the Royal Academy is that it is independent and can do what it wants, money permitting. So even though it has ‘Royal’ over the door, and is in a rather grand place on Piccadilly, there is room to be radical. But I think taste is probably shaped virtually now. I suspect the real world just piggybacks on.   CJLPA : Surely the Royal Academy has a big influence?   RS : Well, it depends on which bit of the Royal Academy. Is it the exhibition we just had on Picasso, or is it the Summer Exhibition? They are very different: one is a scholarly, curated exhibition and the other is really a celebration of creativity. I don’t think the Summer Exhibition shapes taste in any meaningful way now. I think it used to. There’s a hilarious film on YouTube of the Summer Exhibition in 1976—everybody is chain smoking, the women are wearing hats and pearls, and the men are all dressed up in tweeds. But a few hundred yards away you’ve got the Sex Pistols. The Royal Academy really lost touch around this time. But I would argue we’ve moved a long way since then. You can look at the most recent artists we’ve elected, people like Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, and David Adjaye. It’s a very different place.   CJLPA : So do you think it has become more ‘with the times’?   RS : Yes. One of the tricky bits was that when you’re elected as an academician, you’re elected in a category: painting, sculpture, printmaking, or architecture. For an awfully long time, people were saying, ‘Well, what do we do with photographers?’, or, ‘We can’t have photographers because we don’t know where to put them.’ But now Isaac Julien can get elected as a Painter. It’s just a label.   CJLPA : In 1863, the Paris Salon rejected the works of Courbet, Manet, Pissarro, Jongkind, and Whistler. Today’s great art contests, such as the RA Summer Show, are sometimes viewed not as competitions but as lotteries. Do you think there is a risk of great works falling through the cracks? And might there be scope, as there was in 1863, for a Salon des Refusés?   RS : I think the nature of the Summer Exhibition has changed slightly. Back in the old days, there was a consensus about what should be hanging in the Royal Academy, but now for the last six years, maybe more, there’s been a curator coordinator. We’ve had Michael Craig-Martin and Grayson Perry, and this year it was Jane and Louise Wilson. Every year now the Exhibition has a slightly different vision, because the coordinator and committee are different each year. It’s just a reflection of the particular angle of that year’s committee, so it’s not quite as black and white as ‘in’ or ‘out’ and those ‘out’ are cast into darkness. It just means, ‘Not this year but maybe next year.’ Before I was elected, I submitted to the Royal Academy and never got in once.   CJLPA : Was it the same when you applied—that they were still changing curators?   RS : When I was putting in work, I think it was possibly still with a fixed academy view, but it just goes to show that not getting into the Royal Academy doesn’t mean very much if you end up as the president! So it is very different, it’s not really a shaper of any great   taste as it was in the past. Being refused I think is really just ‘try again   next year’ when it’s a different committee.   In the year that Grayson Perry did it, which was our anniversary year, the fact that he was the coordinator shaped the kind of work that was submitted. A huge number of people painted portraits of him, which of course the next year wouldn’t get in at all. Whereas Grayson took them all in because it was quite entertaining to have a wall full of portraits of Grayson. So it’s a much more complex relationship than it was before, because everybody looks at the committee and thinks, ‘OK, I might get in this year because they like the kind of work I do.’ It’s shaped by the committee that we put together, really. It’s not monolithic as it was before.   CJLPA : How do you view your place in the discourse of contemporary art?   RS : I’m in a slightly odd position. When I left art school, I went and did my postgraduate in Japan. This was considered very eccentric in 1979 because everybody wanted to go to New York. I’ve never regretted going to Japan. It was extraordinarily valuable to look back at your own culture, and European culture, through the eyes of a very different culture. It taught me many lessons about one’s narrow assumptions and interpretation of the world. Western perspective, for example, is just the way we choose in the West to represent the world on a flat surface. In Japan and China, they do it in a completely different way. These different visions of the world have been hugely enriching for me.   I was always fascinated by Japan and just wanted to go, though I’m not quite sure why. I got a scholarship and went. Japanese art was what I was drawn to, but I didn’t know much else about Japan, because in those days you didn’t really. Partly it was that things were economically really bad here in the early eighties, whereas Japan was booming. Also, by then I’d learned the language, and once you’ve done that it seems like a waste not to go back! I spent six years there in the end, two in university, and I go back as often as I can.   CJLPA : Has Japan inspired your art?   RS : Yes. When I was there I thought about my work in Japanese, because I lived with Japanese people and had mostly Japanese friends. This was really powerful, and I still do it sometimes. For much of my stay I hardly spoke English at all. When I came back to England, I couldn’t really talk or think about my work in English because it had been ‘created’ in Japanese. It’s like I’ve got two circuits in my head: every now and again when I’m working, I think about the work in Japanese because it can unlock things. My experience in Japan was very valuable indeed. Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin, the interviewer, is a Fashion and Arts & Culture writer, editor, and stylist interested in exploring the intersection of fashion, performance, and identity. Currently, she serves as the editor for The COLD Magazine  where she works across the art and fashion departments, attending key industry events like London Fashion Week, editing and writing features. She is also the External Arts Relations Officer at CJLPA , focused on cultivating partnerships with arts institutions and supporting editorial projects in both visual and performing arts.

Axel Rü̈ger is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts. He is a former Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Mesdag Collection in The Hague. He was educated at Cambridge as well as in Germany and Canada, and has written books on Chinese and Japanese art. We live and die by our programme. If we don’t have exhibitions we may as well close. — Axel Rüger Axel Rüger, former Director of the Van Gogh Museum, joined the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) as the CEO in 2019. What should have been a celebratory period for the RA and a glorious time to be the man in charge, just after the RA’s 250th Anniversary in 2018, quickly descended into mayhem as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold early last year. For the cultural sector, the pandemic has been damning. Museums, galleries, theatres, and concert halls alike have had to adapt swiftly to spare themselves from financial collapse. The RA ‘tries to generate money normally with exhibitions that appeal to a broad public’, and yet it is an ‘eternal struggle to make money’, says Rüger. The greatest public health crisis of our lifetimes has greatly worsened matters for museums. National and international travel restrictions have severely curtailed visitor numbers and, as Rüger explains, there is ‘not an exhibition in the world that can really make money with 20 percent of its visitors’. In response, the RA has had to reduce costs of numerous kinds, and it has been forced to limit the ambition of the exhibitions and events that would draw the public back to the halls of Burlington House. Travel restrictions have also prevented some paintings from being borrowed, such as for the Francis Bacon exhibition (May 2021), which has consequently had to be scaled back. Rüger has been forced to make decisions about ‘how long it is viable’ to keep exhibitions open. ‘We are driven by the exhibitions programme’, he says, and the challenge will be to ‘retain integrity’ as the RA begins to ‘grow again’.   Fortunately, Rüger assures me that donations to the RA have not changed much during the pandemic. ‘[M]any loyal supporters have remained loyal and donated’, although some have understandably had to say, ‘not right now’. Indeed, ‘friends have been remarkably loyal’, and the RA is ‘still in a lucky position from donors’. Despite these positive lifelines, Rüger predicts, in our interview in October 2020, that the RA will lose £12 million in 2020. The RA does not have a ‘regular grant or funding agreement with the government’ but ‘has made use of the job retention scheme’. Many staff have been furloughed to cover some of the running costs of the institution while it waits for renewed revenue from exhibitions. Rüger tells me how the RA is ‘proud of its independence’ but had ‘applied to the cultural recovery fund where you could apply for up to £3 million as a one-off grant: help in the short term [to address the current] cash calamity’. The RA’s application has since been successful.   Moving to discuss the exhibitions themselves, Rüger explains that they are ‘always planned several years out’. Nonetheless, current circumstances are prolonging the wait for some exhibitions which have had to be ‘shunted along for next year and so on’, and two have been cancelled entirely. Rüger is still hoping to present seven exhibitions in the next year, ‘but none of them is really new. They have been on the cards for some time’. Regarding whether any upcoming exhibitions will be inspired by the pandemic, Rüger feels strongly that ‘it is too soon […] We need to distil what is good art from the pandemic’, he says, adding that the RA is ‘here to offer a place of aesthetic enjoyment, reflection, and solace. We are too deep into it. We will need a little bit of time and some clear water after the pandemic. What will that world look like? Some people think we need to change fundamentally’. On whether art produced from the pandemic will reflect health, death, and dying, Rüger is optimistic that it will ‘be more about how we live in our world’. ‘One of the worst things’, says Rüger, is that, during the pandemic, ‘we were banned from doing […] what we as a cultural society do best: providing a community, inspiration, and beauty’. So, he has no current plans to devise exhibitions about the pandemic. Until society has had enough time to heal, the RA will focus on its opportunity to provide a space for escapism.   The RA is, however, certainly moving with current societal waves. Rüger asserts that the RA is ‘trying to be more inclusive’ and that it ‘wants to try harder’. He adds that diversity ‘needs to be reflected by who we are’ with a ‘more diverse body of Royal Academicians and amongst our staff. We need to think and get more perspectives’. Taking place in winter for the first time, last year’s Summer Exhibition demonstrated the RA’s active efforts to be inclusive and to showcase artists from a broad range of backgrounds. Rüger highlights the rooms curated by Isaac Julien CBE of his own work. I ask Rüger what he thinks are the most effective ways in which   we can integrate the study and understanding of global art in the Western canon of the history of art. His response is thoughtfully engaged with the Decolonise Art History movement. ‘Northern Europe’, he says, ‘has a great history of museums and galleries. We in Europe and particularly Northern Europe, because of our colonial past, have a certain paternalistic attitude’. Looking forwards, Rüger is keen to increase diversity at the RA. ‘We need young art historians to go into the field who are from different backgrounds, to look at art with different perspectives. As a German, I have a different experience from my British colleagues, but as a middle-aged white man I can only be open-minded, [and] not bring those views’.   Our conversation then turns to discussion of the RA’s relationship with politics more broadly. Rüger has a clear stance on the institution’s position. He asserts that ‘the role of the Academy should be a platform for allowing debate and exchange, rather than taking a firm stance. Different opinions should be expressed through the art on the walls’. In other words, Rüger’s vision for the RA is that the art speaks for itself and encourages viewers to contemplate political ideas and debates. He tells me that it would be futile to try to impose a political stance on the institution, because ‘as a group of artists, [the Academicians] will never agree on anything at the RA. The only area where I can see the Academy taking a firmer stance is art education and art in the curriculum’. Rüger concludes, on this matter, that the role of the museum is multi-purpose, with a responsibility to provide a space where people can disconnect and enjoy the beauty of art, as well as contemplate current affairs. Rüger highlights the power of the museum, especially during the pandemic, and especially of artists, whom he praises for being able to ‘help us express emotions that we may not be able to express ourselves’.   Our interview comes to an end with Rüger revealing his vision for the RA in the coming years. I ask him if he intends to push the RA in a more modern direction, and what genres of exhibition he thinks London audiences will gravitate towards when they open again. He asserts, ‘I think the Academy should definitely be contemporary. We have living artists after all’. Acknowledging his audiences, he continues: ‘[P]eople, as they become older, tend to be more conservative. But we also have the schools’. There is evidently a fine balance to be struck between appealing to both the RA’s younger and older demographics. Rüger is sensitive to this, and he explains that the large-scale exhibitions that the RA produces do not make the institution the place for ‘super cutting-edge art making […] We have a certain status and a certain position. We might want to be a bit more experimental, but that is more for places like the Serpentine’.   During the first ten months of the pandemic, the country’s primary focus was on science, the development of vaccines, and economic survival. However, as we pass the first anniversary since the pandemic began, society is craving a return of culture and a revival of the arts. The RA reopens on 18 May 2021, with an array of exciting new exhibitions featuring David Hockney, Michael Armitage, Tracey Emin, and Edvard Munch. Louisa Stuart-Smith, the interviewer, is a third-year undergraduate in History of Art at Trinity College, Cambridge, interested in Italian medieval and early Renaissance art and architecture. In 2021 she will begin an MPhil in Italian medieval afterlife images.

Bury [music] so deep under the earth that no sound or echo of it may rise again. —Attributed to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb[1]   Over 10,000 farmers in India committed suicide in 2019, with indebtedness cited as the predominant factor leading to the deaths. In certain states, a farmer is over 80% more likely to take their own life compared with other members of the population.[2] And now, this agrarian crisis has been acutely pressured by the hurried enacting of three new farm laws in September 2020, opening up agricultural trade to private corporations and destroying what little price protection the country’s small and marginal farmers—who constitute 85% of the farmer populace—rely heavily upon to survive market vagaries.[3]   The government’s decisions have been deemed’ ‘undemocratic’ by those in India’s opposition party. Yet in the face of a seemingly bleak prognosis, the response, especially from the Sikh-majority state of Punjab, has been a remarkable exhibition of solidarity in civil resistance. The six months from August 2020 to February 2021 have seen an estimated 300,000 farmers march from Punjab to Delhi and erect settlements at its borders, besieging the city in demonstration against the laws.[4] What is striking about the images from the borders of Singhu, Tikri, and others, is that the protest sites are more resemblant of makeshift towns than rallies. Overhead shots display a tessellation of tractor trollies scattered with marquees offering 24-hour free hot meals, exercise facilities, and even a school for underprivileged children led by volunteer protesters. It is abundantly clear that the farmers are sat in for the long haul. And amongst the array of media, one theme consistently pervades: music.   From the sound of Sikh devotional hymns, or keertan , ringing through the tents, to the iconic figures of the Punjabi pop universe singing to gatherings of thousands, music has served to not only amplify the voice of the masses but also to let their spirits endure during the harsh winter months spent sleeping out in the cold. And it is no coincidence that musical expression has been a prominent medium for harnessing this sentiment, as it is fundamentally inseparable from both Sikh tradition and Punjabi culture.   The centrality of music to Sikh praxis   It is difficult to overstate the centrality of music to Sikh devotional practice. The vast majority of its canonical scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, has been arranged in  rāg.  A melodic framework designed for musical improvisation,  rāg  is akin, but not equivalent, to the melodic modes found in Western music theory. Each composition within the Granth Sahib is written in poetic measure and assigned a  rāg  to which it should be sung. The founder of the faith, Guru Nanak, goes so far as to identify himself as a minstrel, whose message is to be sung, not simply preached.[5] In a sense, Sikhi embodies a sonic theology.   Importantly however, the place of music within the tradition extends beyond mellifluous melody. One of the distinguishing features of Sikh religious observation is a confluence of the meditative and the heroic, with music acting as a thread to bind them together. Its significance is as much temporal as it is spiritual, and nowhere is this epitomised greater than in the flourishing of the  dhādi  tradition during the early seventeenth century. The  dhādi s, literally ‘bards’, were originally thought of as local amateur musicians who weren’t skilled enough to warrant a place in the Mughal courts. Under the sixth Guru of the Sikhs, Hargobind, a deliberate use of the same term was employed as a resignification of the vocabulary. The  dhādi  was not only celebrated in the Sikh tradition, but brought into courts and patronized by the Guru, being referred to as his ‘beloved’.[6] Although a little crude in its periodisation, this time period is also argued to have been an iconoclastic moment in Sikh history, transforming the psyche of the population from one of sainthood to one of warriorhood, and alongside it a more formal establishment of Sikh political authority.   The  vār s (ballads) the  dhādi s sing consist of tales of valour and heroism, intended to evoke a martial spirit and, as Joyce Pettigrew succinctly puts it, ‘overwhelm the conditions of injustice and oppression’.[7] Sikh hagiography places the arising of the  dhādi  along with a materialisation of militancy in the community. The theme of sacrifice for greater good is all but ubiquitous in their renditions:   It is not given to everyone to be a martyr. This position is the highest anyone can attain. The names of those will never remain Who fear death. Great are those fighters who give their life for the nation, Who give their life for the nation.[8]   The strength of the narrative was that it tugged at strings of sovereignty. Martyrdom in the name of justice was to be valorised, not feared, and by being expressed within melody was to increase its efficacy.   *   Fast forward a hundred years, and the place of music is reified again during the milieu of Mughal India under the reign of the emperor Aurangzeb. Italian writer Niccolao Manucci, who spent almost his entire adulthood detailing the lives of the Mughal rulers first-hand, recounts in his famous Storia do Mogor :   Not resting content with the above orders [prohibiting alcohol, drugs, long bears, etc], Aurangzeb … ordered the same official to stop music. If in any house or elsewhere he heard the sound of singing and instruments, he should forthwith hasten there and arrest as many as he could, breaking the instruments.[9]   Whilst the extent of Aurangzeb’s prohibition is debated by musicologists and historians alike, the continuation of the various musical traditions was now most certainly a vehicle of defiance of an oppressive and at times tyrannical kingship. With this antecedent, the use of music to amplify Sikh and Punjabi voices of resistance during the largest mass mobilisation in India’s postcolonial history should by no means come as a surprise.   The Punjabi music industry   A genre that in recent times has been largely typified by a glorification of violence, the Punjabi music industry now resonates with an entirely new flavour of rebellion. Since the start of the protests, dozens of songs have been released by both native Punjabi and diaspora artists in support of the demonstrations, characterised not only by their messages of solidarity but their damning critiques of the Indian polity. The same vibrations of the  dhādi  epics echo through the lyrics that have been fuelled by, and given renewed determination to, the movement.   Kanwar Grewal, a Sufi singer whose work has gained large popularity within the commercial space, is a regular feature on stages throughout the protest site. Crowds have gathered in their tens of thousands to listen to his acapella performances, and he has become something of a talisman for the effort. But his artistry has not been without rebuttal.   Grewal, who hails from a farming family in rural Punjab, has recently had one of his songs removed by YouTube in India. ‘Ailaan’ (‘Proclamation’) was confirmed to have been taken down by YouTube’s headquarters in California after the Indian government filed a complaint. None of the lyrics appear to breach the site’s content guidelines themselves. Instead they violate ‘certain rules and policies laid down by the Indian government’, noted the song’s producer, Harjinder Laddi.[10]   Oh Delhi, you are going to be troubled by this gathering, But only a farmer will have the final word about his crops.[11] —Kanwar Grewal, ‘Ailaan’   This is not the only instance of government retaliation. Singer and lyricist Pawandeep Singh Mohali, more commonly known by his alias Shree Brar, was arrested on 6 January 2021 under the Police Incitement to Disaffection Act for his lyrics encouraging gun culture and exalting lawlessness. The Senior Superintendent of Police, Vikram Jeet Duggal, claimed that ‘[t]he lyrics of the song very much encourage the youth to commit crimes and antisocial acts’.[12] The song in question, ‘Jaan’, was released just a week before the equally provocative ‘Kisaan Anthem’ (‘Farmer Anthem’) which features Brar and nine other Punjabi artists.   ‘Kisaan Anthem’ utilises an evocation of the Sikh Gurus to facilitate an emotion of virtue and righteousness. Brar sings of Guru Nanak blessing the Sikhs with a farming heritage, and implying that their rights have been divinely bestowed. Music, religion, and political resistance are deeply intertwined in these works. It is apparent in Brar’s lyrics, as it is in those of numerous others, that these songs are not designed to generate album sales or bolster fame. Instead, they are saturated by a tangible essence of challenging the hegemony, the source of which is is a long lineage of musical defiance.   O master of the hawk [the tenth Sikh Guru] place your hand on our head and protect us, As we walk alone and our enemy is the government.[13]   —Shree Brar, ‘Kisaan Anthem’   For the thousands of farmers who remain steadfast in their struggle, these musicians and their artistic expression serve as much more than entertainment. There is a deep-rooted sense of heritage and dynasty that vibrates with every note. The lyrics, melody, and rhythm that rang 500 years ago, whose resonance permeates the protests today, are not simply just a chorus of sacred sound. Nor are they merely demonstrations of political recalcitrance. These songs, hymns, and ballads are articulations of a sovereignty, and have become the anthems of a movement. And the orchestra that played to defy injustice over half a millennium ago appears to be just as loud today. Jeevan Singh Riyait   Jeevan Singh Riyait is currently studying for an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has degrees in Mathematics from the University of Leicester, and Theology and Religion from the University of Oxford. Outside of his career in investment banking, his interests include the research and reading of precolonial Sikh history, as well as being an avid cricketer. [1] Katherine Butler Brown, ‘Did Aurangzeb Ban Music? Questions for the Historiography of his Reign’ (2007) 41(1) Modern Asian Studies 77. [2] Dominic Merriott, ‘Factors associated with the farmer suicide crisis in India’ (2016) 6(4) Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health 218. [3] Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers Welfare, All India Report on Agriculture Census 2015-16  (New Delhi: Ministry of Agriculture   & Farmers Welfare, 2021) 28 < http://agcensus.nic.in/document/agcen1516/ac_1516_report_final-220221.pdf > accessed 20 March 2021. [4] Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘Indian farmers march on Delhi in protest against agriculture laws’ Guardian  (London, 30 November 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/30/indian-farmers-march-on-delhi-in-protest-against-agriculture-laws > accessed 24 March 2021. [5] Guru Nanak, Guru Granth Sahib  (first published 1604; Sant Singh Khalsa tr) 151 < http://srigranth.org/servlet/gurbani.gurbani?Action=Page&Param=468&g=1&h=0&r=0&t=1&p=1&k=0 > accessed 27 March 2021. [6] Michael Nijhawan, ‘From Divine Bliss to Ardent Passion: Exploring Sikh Religious Aesthetics through the Ḍhāḍī Genre’ (2003) 42(4) History of Religions 375. [7] Joyce Pettigrew, ‘Songs of the Sikh Resistance Movement’ (1991) 23(1) Asian Music 86. [8] ibid 101. [9] Niccolao Manucci, Storia del Mogol di Nicolò Manuzzi veneziano  (first published 1708, Franco Maria Ricci 1986) 8. [10] Pawanjot Kaur, ‘YouTube Removes 2 Songs on Farmers’ Protest, Producer Says HQ Cited “Govt Intervention”’ ( The Wire , 8 February 2021) < https://thewire.in/agriculture/youtube-removes-farmers-protest-song-himmat-sandhu > accessed 24 March 2021. [11] Vari Rai, ‘Ailaan’ ( Rubai Music , 2020, song recorded by Kawar Grewal) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1t91auJVnM > accessed 27 March 2021. [12] Express News Service, ‘Patiala police arrests singer, lyricist Shree Brar for “glorifying” lawlessness’ ( The Indian Express , 6 January 2021) < https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/chandigarh/shree-brar-arrested-punjab-7134659/ > accessed 24 March 2021. [13] Shree Brar, ‘Kisaan Anthem’ ( PB Studios , 2020, song recorded by Shree Brar et al) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiVuPmh9A > accessed 27 March 2021.

Introduction COVID-19 should not have struck us so unawares: similar viruses, SARS and MERS, had emerged within the last 20 years, and global pandemics had been widely discussed. So why were even rich countries so unprepared? It’s because politicians and the public have a local focus. They downplay the long-term and the global. They ignore Nate Silver’s maxim: ‘The unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable.’   Indeed, we’re in denial about a whole raft of newly emergent threats to our interconnected world, that could be devastating. Pandemics and massive cyberattacks, for instance, are immediately destructive. Their probability may seem low, but they could happen at any time. The worst of them could be so devastating that one occurrence would be too many. And their probability and potential severity is increasing. Indeed, I fear we are guaranteed a bumpy ride through this century. COVID-19 must be a wake-up call, reminding us—and our governments—that we’re vulnerable.   Humans are now so numerous, and have now such a heavy collective ‘footprint’, that they can transform, or even ravage, the entire biosphere. The world is growing, and a more demanding population puts the natural environment under strain. Our collective actions could trigger dangerous climate change and mass extinctions if ‘tipping points’ are crossed—outcomes that would bequeath a depleted and impoverished world to future generations. We’re familiar with these threats, but fail to prioritise countermeasures, because their worst impact stretches beyond the time horizon of political and investment decisions. It’s like the proverbial boiling frog—contented in a warming tank until it’s too late to save itself. We have endured a ‘plague year’, and it remains unclear when, or indeed if, the world will revert to anything close to its ‘old normal’. The ‘global spasm’ that we have collectively experienced—a spasm that is, at the time of this writing, far from over—shows clearly that the ability to make wise decisions based on science has a direct impact on survival—not just personally, but collectively. Because our entire world is so interconnected, a catastrophe in any region can cascade globally, making our society vulnerable to breakdowns. But well-directed, internationally deployed science and technology can offer salvation.   The potentials of biotech and the cyberworld are exhilarating—but they’re frightening too. We are already, individually and collectively, so greatly empowered by rapidly changing technology that we can— by design, or as unintended consequences—engender global changes that will resonate for centuries.   Climate and environment   There are some things we can confidently predict. For instance, there’s firm evidence for climate change. Even within the next 20 years, regional shifts in climatic patterns, and more extreme weather, will aggravate pressures on food and water, and enhance migration pressure. Moreover, under ‘business as usual’ scenarios we can’t rule out, later in the century, really catastrophic global warming, and tipping points triggering long-term trends like the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet. But even those who accept these statements have diverse views on the best policy response. These divergences stem from differences in economics and ethics—in particular, in how much obligation we should feel towards future generations.   The Danish campaigner Bjørn Lomborg has bogeyman status among environmentalists—somewhat unfairly, as he doesn’t contest the science. But his ‘Copenhagen Consensus’ of economists downplays the priority of addressing climate change in comparison with shorter-term efforts to help the world’s poor. That’s because he applies a ‘standard’ discount rate—and in effect writes off what happens beyond 2050. But if you care about those who’ll live into the twenty-second century and beyond, then, as economists like Lord Stern and Professor Martin Weitzman argue, it is worth paying an insurance premium now, to protect those generations against the worst-case longer-term scenarios.[1]   So, even those who agree that there’s a significant risk of climate catastrophe a century hence, will differ in how urgently they advocate action today. Their assessment will depend on expectations of future growth, and optimism about technological fixes. But, above all, it depends on an ethical issue—in optimising people’s life-chances, should we discriminate on grounds of date of birth?   That the world will get warmer is a confident prediction. And with similar confidence we expect that it will get more crowded during this century. 50 years ago, world population was about 3.5 billion. It’s now about 7.7 billion. The growth has been mainly in Asia and Africa. The number of births per year, worldwide, peaked a few years ago and is going down. Nonetheless, world population is forecast to rise to around nine billion by 2050. That’s partly because most people in the developing world are young. They are yet to have children, and they will live longer. The age histogram in the developing world will become more like it is in Europe. By mid-century, Africa will have five times Europe’s population. Lagos and other megacities could have populations of around 40 million.   Population growth seems under-discussed. That’s partly, perhaps, because doom-laden forecasts in the late 1960s—for instance, by the Club of Rome and by Paul Ehrlich—proved off the mark. Also, some deem population growth to be a taboo subject—tainted by association with eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s, with Indian policies under Indira Gandhi, and more recently with China’s hard-line one-child policy. As it’s turned out, food production and resource extraction have kept pace with the rising population. Famines still occur, but they’re due to conflict or maldistribution, not overall scarcity.   To feed nine billion in 2050 will require further-improved agriculture—low-till, water-conserving, and GM crops. It may also require dietary innovations—converting insects, highly nutritious and rich in proteins, into palatable food; and making artificial meat. To quote Gandhi—enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.   Demographics beyond 2050 are uncertain. It’s not even clear whether there’ll be a continuing global rise, or a fall. Urbanisation, declining infant mortality, and women’s education trigger the transition towards lower birthrates—but there could be countervailing cultural influences.   If, for whatever reason, families in Africa remain large, then according to the UN that continent’s population could double again by 2100, to four billion, thereby raising the global population to 11 billion. Nigeria alone would by then have as big a population as Europe and North America combined.   Optimists may note that each extra mouth brings two hands and a brain. But the potential geopolitical stresses of runaway population growth are deeply worrying. As compared to the fatalism of earlier generations, those in poor countries now know, via the Internet etc, what they’re missing. And migration is easier. Moreover, the advent of robots, and ‘reshoring’ of manufacturing, mean that still-poor countries won’t be able to grow their economies by offering cheap skilled labour, as the Asian tiger economies did. It’s a portent for disaffection and instability—multiple megaversions of the tragic loads of boat people crossing the Mediterranean today. Wealthy nations, especially those in Europe, should urgently promote prosperity in Africa, and not just for altruistic reasons.   And another thing: if humanity’s collective impact on land use and climate is too deep, the resultant ‘ecological shock’ could cause mass extinctions. We’d be destroying the book of life before we’d read it. Already, there’s more biomass in chickens and turkeys than in all the world’s wild birds. And the biomass in humans, cows, and domestic animals is 20 times that in wild mammals.   Biodiversity is a crucial component of human wellbeing. We’re clearly harmed if fish stocks dwindle to extinction. There are plants in the rain forest whose gene pool might be useful to us. And insects are crucial for the food chain and fertilisation. But for many environmentalists, preserving the richness of our biosphere has value in its own right, over and above what it means to us humans. To quote the great ecologist EO Wilson, ‘mass extinction is the sin that future generations will least forgive us for’.   Prospects for technology   It would be hard to think of a more inspiring challenge for young scientists and engineers than devising clean and economical energy systems—and sustainable, humane agriculture—for the entire world. Nations should accelerate R&D into all forms of low-carbon energy generation, and into other technologies where parallel progress is crucial—especially storage (batteries, compressed air, pumped storage, flywheels, etc) and smart grids. If carbon-free energy gets cheap enough, then India, for instance, can leapfrog to it. The health of the poor is jeopardised by smoky stoves burning wood or dung, and there would otherwise be pressure to build coal-fired power stations. Likewise, public health should be a global priority.   But we need wisely directed technology. Indeed, many are anxious that innovation is proceeding so fast that we may not properly cope with it—and that we’ll have a bumpy ride through this century. We’re ever more dependent on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, globally dispersed manufacturing, and so forth. Unless these networks are highly resilient, their manifest benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic (albeit rare) breakdowns that cascade globally—real-world analogues of what happened in 2008 to the financial system. Air travel can spread a pandemic worldwide within days.[2] And social media can spread panic and rumour, and psychic and economic contagion, literally at the speed of light.   Biotech offers huge prospects for enhancing health and food production. But there are downsides, from both ethical and prudential perspectives. It offers, for instance, the ability to modify viruses. In 2012, experiments done in Wisconsin and in Holland showed that it was surprisingly easy to make the influenza virus more virulent and more transmissible. This seemed a portent, and in 2014 the US federal government ceased funding these ‘gain of function’ experiments. Similar manipulations can be carried out on coronaviruses. There is of course no suggestion that COVID-19 was malevolently engineered, though there is an ongoing debate about the possibility that it could have been an accidental release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it is known that gain of function experiments were being done.   The new CRISPR-Cas9 technique for gene editing is hugely promising, but there are already ethical concerns—for instance, about Chinese experiments modifying embryos—and anxiety about possible runaway ecological consequences of ‘gene drive’ programmes to wipe out species as diverse as mosquitos or grey squirrels.   Governments will surely adopt a stringent and precautionary attitude to the applications of biotech—and even to the kinds of experiment that can be legally pursued. But I’d worry that whatever regulations are imposed can’t be enforced worldwide, any more than the drug laws or tax laws. Whatever can be done will be done by someone, somewhere.   An atomic bomb can’t be built without large-scale special-purpose facilities. But biotech involves small-scale dual-use equipment. Indeed, biohacking is burgeoning even as a hobby. The rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups (or even individuals), by bio-as well as cyber-technology, will pose an intractable challenge to governments and aggravate the tension between freedom, privacy, and security. The global village will have its village idiots, and they’ll have global range. These concerns are relatively near-term—within ten or 15 years.   By mid-century we might expect two things: a better understanding of the combinations of genes that determine key characteristics of humans and animals; and the ability to synthesise genomes that match these features. If it becomes possible to ‘play God on a kitchen table’, our ecology (and even our species) may not long survive unscathed.   And what about another transformative technology: robotics and artificial intelligence (AI)? DeepMind’s ‘AlphaGo Zero’ computer famously achieved world championship level in the games of Go and chess in just a few hours—it was given just the rules, and learnt by playing against itself over and over again. Its processing speed allowed it to complete several games every second.   Already AI can cope better than humans with complex fast-changing networks—traffic flow, or electric grids. It could let the Chinese gather and process all the information needed to run an efficient planned economy that Marx could only dream of. And in science, its capacity to explore millions of options could allow it to discover recipes for better drugs, or a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance at room temperature. Computers learn to identify dogs, cats, and human faces by ‘crunching’ through millions of images—not the way babies learn. They learn to translate by reading millions of pages of multilingual text—EU documents, for instance (their boredom threshold is infinite!).   The implications for our society are already ambivalent. If there is a ‘bug’ in the software of an AI system, it is not always possible to track it down. This is likely to create public concern if the system’s ‘decisions’ have potentially grave consequences for individuals. If we are sentenced to a term in prison, recommended for surgery, or even given a poor credit rating, we would expect the reasons to be accessible to us, and contestable by us. If such decisions were delegated to an algorithm, we would be entitled to feel uneasy, even if presented with compelling evidence that, on average, the machines make better decisions than the humans they have usurped.   AI systems will become more intrusive and pervasive. Records of all our movements, our health, and our financial transactions, will be in the ‘cloud’, managed by a multinational quasi-monopoly. The data may be used for benign reasons (for instance, for medical research, or to warn us of incipient health risks), but its availability to internet companies is already shifting the balance of power from governments to globe-spanning conglomerates.   There will be other privacy concerns. Are you happy if a random stranger sitting near you in a restaurant or on public transportation can, via facial recognition, identify you and invade your privacy? Or if fake videos of you become so convincing that visual evidence can no longer be trusted? Or if a machine knows enough about you to compose emails that seem to come from you? The ‘arms race’ between cybercriminals and those trying to defend against them will become still more expensive and vexatious when drones, driverless cars, etc proliferate.   Many experts think that AI, like synthetic biotech, already needs guidelines for ‘responsible innovation’. But others, like the roboticist Rodney Brooks (creator of the Baxter robot and the Roomba vacuum cleaner), think that for many decades artificial intelligence will be less of a concern than real stupidity. And machines are still clumsy compared to children in sensing and interacting with the real world.   The incipient shifts in the nature of work have been addressed in several excellent books by economists and social scientists. Clearly, machines will take over much of the work of manufacturing and retail distribution. They can supplement, if not replace, many white-collar jobs: routine legal work, accountancy, computer coding, medical diagnostics, and even surgery. Many ‘professionals’ will find their hard-earned skills in less demand. In contrast, some skilled service-sector jobs—plumbing and gardening, for instance—require non-routine interactions with the external world and will be among the hardest jobs to automate.   The digital revolution generates enormous wealth for innovators and global companies, but preserving a healthy society will surely require redistribution of that wealth. There is talk of using it to provide a universal income. It is better when all who are capable of doing so can perform socially useful work rather than receive a handout.   Indeed, to create a humane society, governments will need to vastly enhance the number and status of those who care for the old, the young, and the sick. There are currently far too few, and they’re poorly paid, inadequately esteemed, and insecure in their positions. Such work is more fulfilling than a job in a call centre or Amazon warehouse. I can foresee this benign redeployment happening in Scandinavia, though there might be ideological barriers in some other nations. We surely hope, when old, to be cared for by someone with real, not synthetic, empathy. We want young children to be told stories by real people who can share and understand their emotions. It is likely that society will be transformed by autonomous robots, even though the jury is out on whether they will be idiots savants  or display superhuman capabilities.   If robots become less clumsy in interacting with the world, would they truly be perceived as intelligent beings? Would we then have obligations towards them? Should we feel guilty if they are underemployed or bored? Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines , even foresees that humans could transcend biology by merging with computers. In old-style spiritualist parlance, they would ‘go over to the other side’. We then confront the classic philosophical problem of personal identity. If your brain were downloaded into a machine, in what sense would it still be ‘you’? Or are the input into our sense organs, and our physical interactions with the real external world, so essential to our being that this transition would be not only abhorrent but also impossible? These are ancient conundrums for philosophers, but practical ethicists may soon need to address them.   Not even Kurzweil thinks this will happen in his lifetime, so he wants his body frozen until immortality’s on offer, and he can be resurrected into some posthuman world.[3] But of course research on ageing is being seriously prioritised. Some think it’s a ‘disease’ that can be cured. Dramatic life extension would plainly have huge ramifications, for society and population projections.   It’s certainly credible that human beings—in their mentality and their physique—may become malleable through genetic and cybernetic technologies. Moreover, this future evolution—a kind of secular ‘intelligent design’—would take only centuries, in contrast to the thousands of centuries needed for Darwinian evolution. This is a game changer. When we admire the literature and artefacts that have survived from antiquity, we feel an affinity, across a time gulf of thousands of years, with those ancient artists and their civilisations. But we can have zero confidence that the dominant intelligences a few centuries hence will have any emotional resonance with us, even though they may have an algorithmic understanding of how we behaved.   Prospects in space   And now I turn briefly to another technology: space. This is where robots surely have a future, and where I‘d argue that these changes will happen fastest and should worry us less.   We depend every day on space for satnav, environmental monitoring, communication, and so forth. These are in large part now commercially funded, though projects with a focus on scientific research and planetary exploration are bankrolled by national or international agencies.   During this century the whole solar system will be explored by swarms of miniature probes, far more advanced than the probes that have beamed back pictures of Saturn’s moons, of Pluto, and beyond—20,000 times further away than the Moon. Think back to the computers and phones of the 1990s, when these probes were designed, and realise how much better we can do today. The next step will be deployment in space of robotic fabricators, which can build large structures under zero gravity—for instance, solar energy collectors, or giant telescopes with huge gossamer-thin mirrors   What about manned spaceflight? The practical case gets weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturisation. Were I an American, I would only support NASA’s un manned programme. And I certainly wouldn’t support a manned programme done by the European Space Agency. I would argue that private ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin—bringing a Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates—should ‘front’ all manned missions. They can impose higher risks than can a Western country on publicly funded civilian astronauts, and thereby slash costs. There would still be many volunteers—some willing to accept the risk of ‘one-way tickets’—driven by the same motives as early explorers, mountaineers, and the like.   By 2100, courageous thrill-seekers may have established ‘bases’ independent from the Earth—on Mars, or maybe on asteroids. Elon Musk says he wants to die on Mars (though not on impact). But don’t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment as clement as even the Antarctic or the top of Everest. Here I disagree with Musk and my late colleague Stephen Hawking. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. Dealing with climate change on Earth is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. There’s no ‘planet B’ for ordinary risk-averse people.   But those pioneer adventurers who escape the Earth could be cosmically important. This is why. They’ll be ill-adapted to their new environment, and beyond the clutches of our terrestrial regulators. They will use all the resources of genetics and cybernetics to adapt. They will change faster and could within a few centuries become a new species. Moreover, if they make the transition to fully inorganic intelligences, they won’t need an atmosphere. They may prefer zero-G. They’ll also be nearly immortal. So it’s in deep space—not on Earth, nor even on Mars—that non-biological ‘brains’ may develop powers that humans can’t even imagine.   This raises the question that astronomers are asked most often: is there life out there already? Or is a sterile cosmos awaiting our progeny? We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds. We don’t know what triggered the transition from complex molecules to entities that can metabolise and reproduce. Moreover, even if simple life is common, it is not clear whether it’s likely to evolve into anything intelligent or complex.   Maybe we’ll one day find ET. On the other hand, Earth’s intricate biosphere could be unique. But it’s important that this wouldn’t render life a cosmic sideshow. That’s because there’s abundant time ahead for posthuman life seeded from Earth to pervade the Galaxy. We’re the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution, but the Sun is less than half way through its life. And the universe may continue for ever. To quote Woody Allen, eternity is very long, especially towards the end.   But even in this ‘concertina’ed’ timeline, extending billions of years into the future as well as into the past, we’re living in a special century. The century when humans could jump-start the transition to entities that far transcend our limitations, and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth. Or—to take a darker view— the century where our follies could foreclose the immense future potential and leave an anarchic and depleted planet.   On our future, this century   Zooming back closer to the here and now, one can offer some tentative hopes, fears, and recipes.   Technologies offer huge promise. But our society is brittle, interconnected, and vulnerable. We fret unduly about small risks— air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation doses, etc. But we’re in denial about some newly emergent threats that could be globally devastating. Some of these are environmental—the pressures of a growing and more demanding population. Others are the potential downsides of novel technologies.   And, of course, most of the challenges are global. Coping with potential shortage of food, water, and resources—and transitioning to low-carbon energy—can’t be achieved by each nation separately. Nor can regulation of potentially threatening innovations. Indeed, a key issue is whether nations need to give up more sovereignty to new organisations along the lines of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, etc.   Scientists have an obligation to promote beneficial applications of their work and warn against the downsides. Universities and academies need to assess which scary scenarios—eco-threats, or risks from misapplied technology—can be dismissed as science fiction, and how best to avoid the hazards that cannot be so dismissed.   The trouble is that even the best politicians focus mainly on the urgent and parochial. They do not focus on long-term global issues, or on averting possible catastrophes that haven’t yet happened, unless such policies feature sufficiently prominently in the press and in their inboxes that they are confident they won’t lose votes by endorsing them.   So concerned scientists must enhance their leverage—by involvement with NGOs, via blogging and journalism, and by enlisting charismatic individuals and the media to amplify their voices. Here are two recent instances:   The Papal encyclical Laudato Si’  had a worldwide influence in the lead-up to the Paris climate conference in 2015. There’s no gainsaying the Catholic Church’s global reach, long-term vision, and concern for the world’s poor.   And I doubt that we in the UK would have legislated against non-biodegradable plastic waste had it not been for the BBC’s Blue Planet II  television programmes fronted by our secular pope, David   Attenborough. The images of albatrosses returning to their nests and regurgitating plastic debris are as iconic as the polar bear on the melting ice floe was in the climate debate.   It’s encouraging to witness more activists among the young, who can hope to live to the end of the century. Their vocal commitment is welcome. It gives grounds for hope.   I’ll end with a flashback, right back to the Middle Ages. For medieval people, the entire cosmology—from creation to apocalypse—spanned only a few thousand years. They were bewildered and helpless in the face of floods and pestilences, and prone to irrational dread. Large parts of the Earth were terra incognita .   But they built cathedrals, constructed with primitive technology by masons who knew they wouldn’t live to see them finished—vast and glorious buildings, that still inspire us centuries later.   In contrast, our horizons in space and time are now vastly extended, as are our resources and knowledge. But we don’t plan centuries ahead. This seems a paradox. But there is a reason. Medieval lives played out against a ‘backdrop’ that changed little from one generation to the next. They were confident that they’d have grandchildren who would appreciate the finished cathedral. But for us, unlike for them, the next century will be drastically different from the present. We can’t foresee it, so it’s harder to plan for it. There is now a huge disjunction between the ever-shortening timescales of social and technological change and the billion-year time spans of biology, geology, and cosmology.   ‘Spaceship Earth’ is hurtling through the void. Its passengers are anxious and fractious. Their life-support system is vulnerable to disruption and breakdowns. But there is too little planning—too little horizon-scanning. This ‘pale blue dot’ in the cosmos is a special place. It may be a unique place. And we’re its stewards at a specially crucial era. That’s an important message for us all, whether or not we’re astronomers.   We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, we need to think long-term. We need to be ’good ancestors’, empowered by twenty-first-century technology but guided by values that science alone can’t provide. Professor Lord Rees Professor Martin Rees, Lord Rees of Ludlow OM FRS, is the UK’s Astronomer Royal. He is based at Cambridge University where he is a Fellow (and former Master) of Trinity College. He is a former President of the Royal Society and a member of many foreign academies. His research interests include space exploration, high energy astrophysics, and cosmology. He is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University (CSER), and has served on many bodies connected with education, space research, arms control, and international collaboration in science. In addition to his research publications he has written many general articles and ten books, including most recently  On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (paperback version due in October 2021). [1] I’d note that there’s one policy context when an essentially zero discount rate is applied: radioactive waste disposal, where the depositories are required to prevent leakage for at least 10,000 years. This is somewhat ironic, since we can’t plan the rest of energy policy even 30 years ahead. [2] Pandemics also cause far more societal breakdown than in earlier centuries. English villages in the fourteenth century continued to function even when the black death halved their populations. In contrast, our societies would be vulnerable to serious unrest as soon as hospitals were overwhelmed– which would occur before the fatality rate was even one percent. (And there’s likewise huge societal risk from cyberattacks on infrastructure, etc.) [3] I was surprised to find that three academics back in England had gone in for these ‘cryonics’. Two had paid the full whack; the third had taken the cut-price option of wanting just his head frozen. I was glad they were from Oxford, not from my university. For my part, I’d rather end my days in an English churchyard than an American refrigerator.