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The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) was set up in 1948 following the 1942 Beveridge report, a cross-party report which established its core principles. Since then, the two main political parties in the UK, the Conservative and Labour parties, have had differing approaches to how the NHS ought to be managed and financed. Today, healthcare is the largest single item of government expenditure, accounting for 24% of public spending compared with only 7% in the 1950s. This article will map the UK’s healthcare spending over the past 25 years, surveying the approaches of the various governments during this time. It will soon be clear why the NHS is struggling to meet its own performance criteria and why it has battled to deliver much-needed elective care during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.   Fig 1 shows the share of gross domestic product (GDP) attributed to healthcare expenditure between 1997 and 2018. Healthcare spending has risen considerably over the last 24 years, starting out at 6.9% of GDP in 1997 before plateauing at 10% from 2009 onwards. However, while UK health-related spending stagnated, the ratio of healthcare expenditure to GDP rose over the same period for four of the six other G7 countries. Simply looking at healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP can, however, be a poor prognostic tool in determining how successful a healthcare system is. For example, in 2017 the US outperformed all G7 nations in this metric, with a total healthcare spend of 17.1% of GDP, but performed poorly in key healthcare success metrics such as healthcare outcomes, equity, and access. Instead of looking at this solely as a stand-alone percentage, it is important to look at its growth over time. Fig 1. The share of UK GDP attributed to healthcare expenditure, 1997–2018. Data: ONS.  Adjusting for economy-wide inflation, fig 2 shows the annual average growth rates in UK public spending on health between 1949 and 2018. Growth in healthcare spending has fluctuated over time, with peaks in spending over the past 40 years largely attributed to Labour governments, as evident in fig 2. Under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, UK public spending on health averaged a real growth rate of 6%, six times the rate of growth under the coalition government which followed. Fig 2. Average annual growth rates in UK public spending on health, 1949–2018. Data: ONS. The 2008 economic crash   The 2008 economic crash and the subsequent period of austerity severely impacted the economy, contracting the UK’s GDP by 6.3% in Q1 2008. The continued impact of the crash resulted in a Department of Health and Social Care budget that continued to grow, only at a much slower pace than in previous years. Adjusting for inflation, the healthcare budget rose by 1% each year on average in the five years between 2009–10 and 2014–15, compared to the average 3.6% rise since the NHS was established.   The NHS’ five-year deal   In June 2018, then-Prime Minister Theresa May announced a new five-year funding deal that would see NHS funding rise by £20.5bn in 2023–24 compared to 2018–19. An increase of around 3.3%, this is closer to the long-term average of 3.6%, though still lower than it. This long-term commitment to improving NHS funding only applied to services within the mandate of NHS England, and was only sufficient to let it meet its immediate demands. It excluded important areas of the Department of Health and Social Care budget such as capital investment, public health, and the education and training of NHS staff. The government chose not to invest more heavily in innovation, health promotion, and its workforce. This choice has worsened the NHS’ ability to keep up with increasing demand and to adopt new medical technology, and it has contributed to the NHS’ staffing crisis.   Using the lower bound of healthcare spending models means that budgets are almost always increased by the government, with predictions falling short of actual demand levels. This often means making ad hoc budget announcements outside of the usual budgetary process and redirecting money away from capital budgets to fund day-to-day financing of the NHS. This leads to a cycle of poor strategic planning, negatively impacting the quality of investment in the health service. Fig 3. Budget of the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care in real terms (£bn), 2019–22. Data: ONS.   The impact of the pandemic   The nation-wide lockdown aimed at curbing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant harm to the UK economy, contracting the UK’s GDP by over 20% in Q2 2020. The government, in attempting to mitigate the economic impact of the crisis, launched the largest public stimulus program in the post-war period. Vast sums of money have been spent propping up businesses across the country, furloughing staff, and making sure the public sector meets its bottom line. However, the government’s public spending spree, alongside reduced tax revenue and a contraction in GDP, pushed the UK’s debt-to-GDP ratio to its highest in more than 50 years. Unsurprisingly, in less than a year, the eight years of fiscal retrenching under the coalition and Conservative governments has been undone.   The impact of the pandemic on future NHS funding is uncertain, although there could well be an increase as the public becomes more conscious of the importance of healthcare spending and a well-functioning NHS. In the short term, the UK has attempted to manage the pandemic’s negative health outcomes by spending an extra £63.4bn on health and social care. However, with the Chancellor already speaking of the need for ‘hard decisions’, it seems likely that the significantly worse position of the UK government’s finances may cause NHS spending to grow at a slower pace. This is already evident in the reduction of COVID-19 healthcare spending by 65% (from £63.4bn in 2020–21 to a proposed spend of £22.4bn in 2021–22) despite uncertainty surrounding whether the pandemic is likely to end soon. This is without considering the long-term negative impacts of the pandemic, such as the longer waiting lists for hospital treatment. Concerningly, a large proportion of the patients facing longer waiting times are those on waiting lists for elective surgery, such as surgery relating to cancers and cardiovascular disease. The number of people on these lists topped five million during the pandemic, the highest since records began in 2007. This new data suggests that over 9% of England’s population is waiting for care. On top of core NHS spending, the proposed budget to tackle the backlog drawn up by the Cabinet Office has proposed that the government may have to commit anywhere between £2bn and £10bn over the next four years on top of core spending. Recently, core NHS spending has risen from £150.4bn in 2019–20 to £159bn in 2021–22. This only represents a 3.3% annual average growth, which fails to match historical growth of the NHS budget. This is despite the NHS battling through an unprecedented pandemic and recovering from a challenging year. Neither current nor predicted growth matches the 6% average annual real growth achieved during the 14 years of Labour government between 1996–97 and 2009–10.[1]   The rise in the waiting list for non-urgent NHS treatment and the worsening mental health crisis underline the struggle the NHS faces as it tries to return to normal following a year battling COVID-19 pandemic. Short-term increases in healthcare funding have been used to meet new obligations, such as virology services to combat virus mutations, an incredibly successful COVID-19 vaccination campaign, and the ‘Track and Trace’ initiative. Improved funding will make the NHS more resilient to surges in demand, and it is likely to require pandemic-level spending to manage the long-term pressures from COVID. However, with the worsening position of the UK’s finances and the need to save money, it would be challenging for any Chancellor to reduce spending without impacting the health service, as the NHS accounts for 24% of government spending, a figure which is predicted to rise. Fatima Osman   Fatima Osman is a fifth-year medical student at Imperial College London. She completed an intercalated degree in Management at Imperial College Business School where she became interested in Health Economics. She has worked with clinicians and health economists to lead two publications in the field. She is excited to use her skills to formulate approaches to improve the cost effectiveness of healthcare provision by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and healthtech. [1] Matt Hancock, ‘Secretary of State’s oral statement on the NHS Long Term Plan’ (oral statement to Parliament, London, 7 January 2019) < https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/secretary-of-states-oral-statement-on-the-nhs-long-term-plan--2 >; HM Treasury, ‘GDP deflators at market prices, and money GDP December 2019 (Quarterly National Accounts)’ (7 January 2020) < https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/gdp-deflators-at-market-prices-and-money-gdp-december-2019-quarterly-national-accounts > both accessed 1 March 2021.

Postcards have long been linked to memory formation, sold primarily as ‘souvenirs’, a term itself deriving from the French verb souvenir  (to remember). The mnemonic role of postcards is particularly worth discussing with regard to the cultural output of places where memory is contested, and which have undergone and continue to undergo upheaval resulting from conflict. This is the case of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, often referred to collectively as ‘Donbas’.[1] Although parts of these regions have been occupied by or engaged in conflict with Russia since 2014, their difficult relationship with memory and trauma long predates that.   Not long after the start of the conflict, photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind came across a bundle of postcards in a post office in Sloviansk, Donbas, with the words ‘Welcome to Donetsk’ emblazoned across idyllic images of the city. Moved by the juxtaposition of the war surrounding her and the close resemblance of the photographs to her British hometown, Taylor-Lind was prompted to entirely reconsider how places at war should be depicted. Together with Donbas-born Alisa Sopova, Taylor-Lind set up a project entitled ‘Welcome to Donetsk’, in which they sent thousands of postcards from Donbas to homes around the globe. Each one bore a handwritten note stating the name of a victim of the conflict, and the circumstances of their death. Their project has led to the creation of a comprehensive list of victims from all sides of the war, with Taylor-Lind stating her intention to continue documenting these names until the end of the war.[2] Fig 1. Lilya Nimenko postcard (Anastasia Taylor-Lind). 'Welcome to Donetsk' project. Courtesy of Anastasia Taylor-Lind. . Turning to an entirely different medium, postcards also play a significant role in prompting discussions of memory in Serhiy Zhadan’s 2010 novel Voroshilovgrad,  centred on Donbas after independence. The novel’s protagonist, Herman, recalls speaking about postcards of the city of Voroshilovgrad (now Luhansk) in his German class during the Soviet era, but struggles to reconcile that memory with a present in which it seems incongruous: ‘I never went to Voroshilovgrad, either. And now there’s no such thing as Voroshilovgrad’.[3] Later in the novel, Olga, an accountant from Herman’s hometown, echoes this sentiment of detachment from one’s own past when her discovery of a collection of such postcards brings back memories of sending them to German pen pals. This prompts a reflection building on that of Herman. She voices a struggle to believe one’s own memories: ‘there’s no such city as Voroshilovgrad anymore, and the boy from Dresden doesn’t write me anymore, and it’s like none of that even happened, or it wasn’t even part of my life’.[4]   Despite the differences in genre—one draws on real-life events, and the other is fiction—the approaches of the two projects to postcards and their mnemonic value have significant parallels. It is therefore worth exploring further how the two converge in their visions of Donbas. They converge firstly regarding the interaction between postcards, naming practices, and memory formation. They also converge on the relationship of postcards to realities past and present, and the perception of postcards as places.   One factor which contributed to starting ‘Welcome to Donetsk’ was Taylor-Lind’s increasing awareness of how conventional war photography casts people living through conflict as ‘characters from a war story’[5]—victims, war dead, combatants—rather than people not so different from the viewer. ‘Welcome to Donetsk’ departs from this convention, writing out the names of those who have died, regardless of whether they were a civilian, combatant, or journalist, and regardless of nationality or political views. The process of naming creates a juxtaposition against the mass-produced postcard. The impact of which is confirmed by the emotional reaction of the postcards’ recipients, many of whom decided to commemorate the person named in their postcard, for example by holding small memorials.[6] Uniting pre-war photos of the region with the names of real people therefore challenges the ‘othering’ of places of war and their inhabitants by underscoring the deeply personal impact of war.   For Zhadan, postcards also provide an opportunity to explore the importance of naming in memory. Herman’s memory of postcards depicting the Voroshilovgrad of his adolescence appears to represent a dichotomy: ‘That city doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s called Luhansk now’.[7] This suggests that renaming a place is tantamount to replacing it, in the most literal sense of the word: re-placing . Memories are cut adrift, with no tangible referent. As   noted by Pavlo Shopin, ‘It is a signifier without a signified’.[8] Indeed, Luhansk has not had a linear history, instead experiencing multiple repetitions: the city’s name was changed no fewer than four times in the twentieth century, finally returning to ‘Luhansk’ in 1990.[9] Herman therefore conveys the sense of illegitimacy and shame accompanying memories from former regimes, a sentiment against which the author appears to push back. Zhadan’s naming the novel ‘ Voroshilovgrad ’, despite it not being set there, reflects Herman’s experience of having memories ‘of’ a place which he has never visited. Zhadan’s focus on naming thus tackles the difficult line between ‘denouncing a regime and devaluing the lives lived under it’,[10] suggesting that naming is significant not only in confirming the existence of a place, but also in legitimising the existence and memories of those who live in its vicinity.   The idea that a place ‘doesn’t exist anymore’, however, goes beyond naming. Such assertions problematise the relationship between past and present. Political changes can suddenly, prematurely transform a postcard from a contemporary vision of a place, into a piece of archive material. In ‘Welcome to Donetsk’, this clash in perceptions is epitomised by the two sides of the postcard, which represent two realities simultaneously—war and peace—but only one place. In this way, the project does not simply tell the same story twice on the two sides of the card, but instead suggests that radically different perceptions of a place must be acknowledged as parts of the same story. In Voroshilovgrad , in contrast, the postcards that Olga finds are incomplete, never having been written or sent, and therefore seemingly bear only one ‘side’ of the story. Prematurely cut off from fulfilling their purpose, these postcards share a certain parallel with the sudden renaming of the city, and with Herman’s sense of incompletion. Nevertheless, Zhadan subverts any sense of unfulfilment, as the unwritten side of the postcard demonstrates that the card is intended for its owner alone. The unwritten side can thus be interpreted as symbolising the characters’ full ownership of their memories, reaffirming the legitimacy of individual perceptions of the past, without moulding them to the expectations of anyone else.   This is to say not that either use of postcards engages explicitly with the reality of place, but quite the opposite. In Voroshilovgrad , for example, characters admit to using postcards to project a desired view of a place. Olga recalls how she would ‘pick out the ones with tons of flowers because I wanted him [a German pen pal] to think that Voroshilovgrad was a fun city’.[11] This is by no means unusual. Daniel Reynolds notes the tendency for postcards to depict ‘clichéd scenic views in garishly enhanced colours’.[12] It can therefore be suggested that postcards create a certain complicity between sender and recipient, with both being aware of their shared part-imagining of place. It can therefore be useful to consider why postcards are chosen over letters by both Taylor-Lind and Zhadan. Through the medium of postcards, the sender brings the recipient within the paradigms of a mutually imagined reality. Jacques Derrida observed that in a postcard image ‘one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far’,[13] and this underlines how the medium of postcards, with the intersection of decontextualised images and a written message, lends itself to an almost floating, quasi-imagining of place. Taylor-Lind’s project speaks to a blurring of boundaries between the real and imagined since, although she specifically chose postcards of pre-war Donbas, these too become subject to imagination, as the basis of those images no longer exists in the state in which it is depicted. Whereas Olga chose postcards based on their novelty, Taylor-Lind chose them based on their banality, in order to evoke greater empathy on the part of the recipient. She explained: ‘In these cards Donetsk looks like an ordinary, peaceful European city, like anyone’s hometown, like my hometown’.[14] This challenges the binaries of the imagined and real, the pre-war and ‘war-torn’, emphasising that places designated as ‘warzones’ were not always so, and that those living in such places are not so different from the postcards’ recipients. Thus, although in both Taylor-Lind’s project and Zhadan’s novel, postcards are reminders of the past, the images of the past on postcards engage with the adaptation and part-imagination of reality, suggesting that this is always part of the experience of a place, and that no single perception of a place is more valid than another.   Yet postcards are not simply valued for their relation to memories of a place. They become places in their own right. In Voroshilovgrad , for instance, postcards are a mnemonic tool for recalling memories associated with a place and time, rather than for remembering the place itself. This is epitomised by Herman recollecting that he ‘never went to Voroshilovgrad’,[15] and yet that his memory of it stems from the postcards which he ‘talked about … in German for years’,[16] demonstrating that memories linked to postcards are only partially connected to place. Olga similarly declares, ‘Maybe these pictures are  my past’,[17] suggesting that postcards are valued more for the   memories they evoke and help to preserve than for the places they depict. In this way, Zhadan’s depiction of postcards resonates with Pierre Nora’s theory of ‘lieux de mémoire’ (‘sites of memory’), ‘where memory crystallizes and secretes itself’.[18] The memories contained within postcards render them places themselves—sites of memory— autonomous but not unrelated to history. This is echoed on the metanarrative level, with the reader ‘remembering’ Voroshilovgrad as a result of the book’s name despite never having been there, and despite the novel not even being set there. Not dissimilarly, Taylor-Lind’s project of remembrance ultimately promotes the production of memory for a recipient who did not experience that place or know that person. Both Zhadan and Taylor-Lind arguably encourage the creation, and not just the preservation, of what could be termed ‘vicarious memory’. Their works therefore portray postcards as an aid not only against forgetting one’s own memories, but also against forgetting the memories of others. Fig 2. Serhiy Feoktistov postcard (Anastasia Taylor-Lind). 'Welcome to Donetsk' project. Courtesy of Anastasia Taylor-Lind. . The communicative aspect of postcards differs between the two, however. In ‘Welcome to Donetsk’, the reaction of the recipients is arguably the most important element of the project, helping to provoke empathy for those in faraway conflicts. As Taylor-Lind notes, the postcards are only half of the story: ‘what they do is provide a catalyst for research, engagement, and conversation within foreign homes’.[19] Zhadan, conversely, has a greater focus on unsent postcards, illustrated when Olga notes, ‘I would just keep all the other ones … And I just found them. A whole stack of them’.[20] Kept almost like an unintentional private archive, and found many years later, they could be interpreted as being unfinished and abortive, telling a story with no satisfactory ending, echoing the characters’ feeling of sudden severance from their past at the fall of the Soviet Union. It could appear that the postcards have been robbed of their purpose. However, it soon becomes clear that, for Zhadan’s characters, not only are postcards for their recipients, but their function as ‘lieux de mémoire’ also aids their original owners. Olga’s discovery of postcards from her past exemplifies this. It prompts not only recollections, but also defiance, and determination to acknowledge memories despite the pressures of collective memory. She states that these memories are ‘Something they took away from me and forced me to forget. But I haven’t forgotten’.[21] In this way, postcards lend tangibility to memory, and the way in which they can be found after many years, as happens in Olga’s case, provides a material parallel to the process of remembering.   Taylor-Lind, on the other hand, emphasises that such ‘lieux de mémoire’ are not only for those who hold memories related to that past. The communicative aspect of postcards can transform postcards into agents of vicarious memory for those detached from, for example, Donbas. ‘Welcome to Donetsk’ therefore turns postcards into mobile ‘lieux de mémoire’, sites of remembrance which are almost tombstones for the victims of the war. Paradoxically, the mobility of postcards makes them more permanent, when there is both a physical and ontological threat to many parts of Donbas, and thus also to cemeteries and sites of remembrance. The differing uses of postcards as ‘lieux de mémoire’ between Taylor-Lind and Zhadan therefore demonstrates that they are not only for those who battle with their own memories, but also for those who wish to remember something, or rather someone, that they never met.   Literature, real-life conflict, and memory intersect in these two examples of cultural production from Donbas, to demonstrate that postcards can be not only tools in remembering, but also in remembrance, through their status as ‘lieux de mémoire’. These representations and uses of postcards hint that the relationship between postcard and place is highly complex. The ‘place’ depicted is often more a result of desired projections of imagination than of lived reality, and postcards become places of memory of their own, independent from the unfolding of history. Comparing the two projects demonstrates the value of postcards in memory, not only in the conventional communicative form, but also for the owner of the unsent postcard. Zhadan in particular suggests that detachment from places and from one’s own memories that is due to sudden historical divides does not have to result in forgetting such memories. Taylor-Lind goes beyond this, using postcards as places of remembrance , creating forms of vicarious memory for the recipients.   Donbas is no stranger to changes in identity and in the status of memories, and this is set to be the case at least for the near future. However, Zhadan and Taylor-Lind use postcards to demonstrate a defiance to the fragility of memory in the region, and to underscore that inhabitants’ memories do not have to be tainted by the actions of a regime. Therefore, although both projects problematise the interplay of memory and place when place can no longer be relied upon as a tangible mnemonic referent, they ultimately converge in their shared use of postcards to represent possibilities for accepting the past, and for empathising with the experiences of others. Alice Mee   Alice Mee is a third-year undergraduate in Modern and Medieval Languages (French, Spanish, and Ukrainian) at Queens' College, Cambridge. She has spent the first eight months of her year abroad working at the Parliament of Ukraine, where she became very interested in matters surrounding the ongoing conflict with Russia. Before returning to Cambridge for her final year, Alice is working with an NGO supporting smallholder coffee farmers in Costa Rica. [1] The name ‘Donbas’ is used here for concision, although its usage remains contested. Dmytro Krapyvenko, ‘Павло Жебрівський: «Донбас —це совковий ідеологічний топонім»’ ( Український Тиждень , 7 December 2017) < https://tyzhden.ua/Society/205344 > accessed 9 March 2021. [2] Anastasia Taylor-Lind, ‘War is personal: how social media brings home news of faraway conflicts’ (2015) 69(4) Nieman Reports 16, 23. [3] Serhiy Zhadan, Voroshilovgrad  (Isaac Stackhouse and Reilly Costigan-Humes trs, Deep Vellum Publishing 2016) 182. [4] ibid 434-5. [5] Taylor-Lind (n 2) 19. [6] ‘WelcomeToDonetsk: Photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind Presents Her Work at HURI’ ( HURI , 14 April 2016) < https://huri.harvard.edu/news/welcometodonetsk-photojournalist-anastasia-taylor-lind-presents-her-work-huri > accessed 22 February 2021. [7] Zhadan (n 3) 181. [8] Pavlo Shopin, ‘Voroshylovhrad Lost: Memory and Identity in a Novel by Serhiy Zhadan’ (2013) 57(3) The Slavic and East European Journal 372, 377. [9] Tanya Zaharchenko, ‘While the Ox Is Still Alive: Memory and Emptiness in Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshylovhrad’ (2013) 55(1-2) Canadian Slavonic Papers 45, 52. [10] ibid 66. [11] Zhadan (n 3) 434. [12] Daniel P Reynolds, Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance  (New York University Press 2018) 2. [13] Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and beyond  (Alan Bass tr, University of Chicago Press 1987) 13. [14] Taylor-Lind (n 2) 19. [15] Zhadan (n 3) 182. [16] ibid 181. [17] ibid 435. [18] Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’ (1989) 26 Representations 7. [19] Taylor-Lind (n 2) 22. [20] Zhadan (n 3) 434. [21] ibid 435.

1. Introduction Music theory is white. —Philip Ewell Thus begins Philip Ewell’s article ‘Music Theory and the White Racial Frame’.[1] His rigorous analysis of the systemic racism and white supremacy in music theory, and his subsequent lectures on assimilationism in music, have certainly created a tidal wave in Western academic circles, with some institutions responding by acknowledging ‘racism and bias in their program’ and subsequently revising their curricula.[2]   The response to this impactful debate was rather different in China—one might describe it as nearly nonexistent. A month after an article on Ewell was published in The New Yorker , a schedule appeared on the Chinese social media platform WeChat .[3] Released by one of the few elite conservatories in China, the schedule detailed all upcoming lectures in the conservatoire’s ‘2020 Season of Academic Music Studies’.[4] There were 26 lectures in total on the schedule: 22 on Beethoven, with the 4 remaining lectures on music and neuroscience, European philosophy and aesthetics, musical semiotics, and ancient Chinese music. A pattern similar to the one Ewell described in his article had emerged: a large emphasis on European theories and disciplines dominated by white men, a brief segment about Chinese music, next to nothing about the music traditions and theories elsewhere in the world—and certainly nothing about music and race. The brief segment about Chinese music which was included was, incidentally, about the ancient music of the Han people—the largest ethnic group in China—and thereby excluded Chinese ethnic minorities. Therefore, one naturally doubts whether Ewell’s ideas and the significant debate around them have entered the horizons of academic music studies in China at all.   A quick search on Baidu , the largest search engine legally accessible in China, shows that no discussions in Chinese were made about Ewell and his work except for one post on the zhihu.com, the Chinese equivalent of the question and answer website Quora, by a PhD student based in Canada whom I know personally.[5] It was at this point that I began to question whether the issue of race and music is discussed at all in mainland Chinese academia. I entered several different combinations of the keywords ‘music’ ( yinyue , 音乐), ‘race’ ( zhongzu , 种族), ‘ethnicity’ ( minzu,  民族) and ‘racism’ ( zhongzuzhuyi , 种族主义) on the website of CNKI, a major research and information publishing institution in China. However, the search results contained mainly journal articles on blues and hip-hop music written by researchers in cultural studies, and some on the preservation of traditional music of ethnic minority groups in China. This debate had been virtually overlooked by the Chinese community of music scholars.   Racism in Chinese culture: Nonexistent or overlooked?   One might argue that Ewell’s analysis of the white racial frame and of racism in music is ‘utterly irrelevant in the Chinese context’ because racism ‘is a modern phenomenon which originated in Europe’.[6] This is the argument used by Xu Wei, who, writing for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), had defended a song-and-dance number in China’s state-run Spring Festival Gala against claims of racism. It featured a Chinese actress ‘wearing blackface and fake buttocks’ to portray an African mother who gushes, ‘I love Chinese people. I love China’.[7] Xu, referencing Pierre-André Taguieff and Clifford Geertz, argues that the show was not, in fact, racist in a Chinese context, for the following reasons: Racist symbols depend heavily on cultural contexts. Several popular characters in Chinese traditional operas were often portrayed with black faces (citing PRC premiers Zhou Enlai and Wen Jiabao). Blackface portrayals of African characters by Chinese people show that ‘African people and Chinese people are one family’.[8]   2.1. Chinese racial frames: Old and new, Eastern and Western   What Xu fails to acknowledge, however, is the supremacist undertone of the show. China and Chinese people are portrayed as the cultured forces which offer civilisation and generous help, while African people remain subservient, singing their praises. This undertone calls to mind the complex history of racism in Chinese culture. The ancient Chinese concept of ‘Sinocentrism’, and the ‘Sino–barbarian’ dichotomy, would let one ‘regard all foreigners as objectively inferior’ and view China as ‘the most advanced civilisation in the world’. They were overwhelmed by the influx of European culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[9] This drastic change meant that the Chinese ‘idea of “race” (zhong [ 種], “seed”, “species”, “race”) transitioned from cultural exclusiveness to racial exclusiveness’, but it also brought white supremacy—and even anti-black racism—to China.[10] The resulting modern Chinese mindset regarding race and culture can therefore be interpreted as a subversion of the ancient ‘Sinocentric’ model by the European idea of white supremacy. It was further complicated by xenophobic, anti-Western propaganda, as well as the regime’s ever-changing relations with other communist states, which influenced the history of communist China.   Another way to interpret this mindset would be to use Dr Ibram X Kendi’s concept of non-white assimilationism, which Ewell drew on profusely in his lectures, whereby people of colour express ‘the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviourally inferior and is supporting cultural or behavioural enrichment programmes to develop that racial group’.[11]   The overlaps and clashes between the two racial frames resulted in a unique phenomenon. Chinese culture was often deemed ‘backwards’, but it was also revered as a symbol of national pride, because of the complex origins of China’s nationalism—a mixture of Westernisation, iconoclasm, and Sinocentrism. Because of China’s major defeats at the hands of European nations and Japan in the nineteenth century, European and Japanese ideals gradually came to be perceived as superior yet at the same time foreign and untrustworthy. Soviet/ Russian culture was at first revered because of the rise of the Communist Party of China and the subsequent establishment of the PRC. However, its influence later waned because of the Sino-Soviet split and the post-Mao, reform-era influx of Western culture. African and other Asian cultures, including those of ethnic minority groups in China, stay at the bottom of the hierarchy, as they do in the white racial frame. While some suggested that authorities in the PRC tended to ‘portray racism as a Western phenomenon’, outbursts of racist and Han-chauvinist sentiments still occur in modern China. Exemplars are the 1988 Nanjing anti-African protests and the racist actions against Africans in Guangzhou amid the COVID-19 crisis.[12] One can therefore conclude this is solid proof that racism and a unique duality of racial frames do indeed exist in modern China, which overlap and clash with the European white racial framework.   2.2. Eurocentrism in Chinese music and the Chinese racial frame   In the domain of music, especially of music academia, this Chinese racial frame takes the form of a reluctant but futile acceptance of assimilationism and, as a result, European supremacy. Shen Yang Yandi, the deputy director of the China Association of Music Theory, admitted in an interview that there is ‘no Chinese mother tongue in a musical sense, or, to put it differently, we have lost our [musical] language’.[13]   He illustrated this by pointing out that ‘80% of what we teach in conservatories is Western music (西方音乐, “music from the West”), same with our concert life’, and that even ‘the concert itself’ and the modern Chinese orchestra was developed in China by ‘copying Western art’. This means that Western music is in a dominant position in China, and is an unavoidable reality. Yang believed that the reason for this reality was that Western music, a tradition of art music, had no equivalent in classical Chinese culture, and that China did not have a powerful tradition of art music in a Western sense, causing profound confusions and clashes when Western music was introduced in China. He furthered his argument by stating that ‘we still understand it—“Western music”—insufficiently and superficially’, which ‘made the destructive effect [of the introduction of Western music] all the more violent’. While lamenting the absence of ‘a reliable, comprehensive biography of Beethoven’ in Chinese and ‘a serious Chinese scholarship on Beethoven’s 9 symphonies’, Yang also fleetingly mentioned the ‘preservation of Guqin, Kunqu, long song and Muqam as world heritages’.[14]   However, Yang did not discuss any other musical traditions, such as jazz, blues, rock, gamelan, or Indian classical music, except for a fleeting acknowledgement of the ‘impingement we face from [Western] popular music’, despite many of these traditions also being ‘powerful and rich traditions of art music’ and some also coming from the West.[15] Here, Yang reveals not only the dominance of ‘Western music’ in China, but also the underlying assumption that the default ‘Western music’ (or, ‘music from the West’) for him and his audience should be European classical music. This is precisely the assumption attacked by Ewell in his articles, blog posts, and lectures. Yang’s subtle dismissal of popular music, and the conspicuous absence of other classical music traditions from his remarks, indicate his own conforming to the aforementioned Chinese racial frame, and possibly, to some extent, to assimilationism and the white racial frame. Above all, Yang’s interview is a brutally honest depiction of the systemic Eurocentrism which permeates the contemporary Chinese music scene. Shen Qia’s comment should serve as an appropriate conclusion to this section: ‘In China, Eurocentrism has made a more profound impact on music than any other artistic fields’.[16]   Case study: Racial-Ethnic frames in Li Chongguang’s Basic Music Theory   Ewell investigated the white racial frame of music theory by examining widely used American music theory textbooks and looking for patterns in their musical examples. I believe the same analysis could be performed on Basic Music Theory  by Li Chongguang, a ‘foundational music theory textbook’ which influenced ‘generations of Chinese people who wished to enter the world of music’ and is still widely used to this day.[17] First published in 1962, the book was based on Elementarnaya Teoriya Muzyki  by Igor Vladimirovich Sposobin with ‘additional sections on Chinese music’. It remains one of the best-selling music textbooks on Chinese e-commerce platforms.[18] It is therefore plausible to use Basic Music Theory as the Chinese counterpart to Ewell’s selection of American music theory textbooks. I analysed musical examples in Basic Music Theory  using the same method as Ewell (fig 1). Fig 1. Racial/regional demographic data for musical examples from Basic Music Theory . Of the 333 musical examples in Basic Music Theory , 253 (roughly 76%) were written by composers who identified as Chinese, or had been transcribed by formally trained Chinese composers from ‘folk tunes’ which originated in mainland China. 79 examples (roughly 24%) were by composers who were mainly active in Western and Eastern European countries (including Tsarist Russia and the USSR). 1 (less than 1%) was supposedly transcribed from a (North) Korean ‘folk tune’. None of these examples came from outside China, Korea, or Europe. None of them was composed by a person of African or American heritage, or indeed from any other musical cultures. The book succeeded in introducing students to key concepts in Western functional harmony, and to the Chinese pentatonic scales, as well as the Chinese Gongche  notation and the numbered musical notation system which was popular in China at the time.[19] However, it made no effort to introduce or even mention any other musical traditions, let alone other theoretical systems. Therefore, I share Ewell’s conclusion that these music theory examples are ‘literally, from a critical-race perspective’, Chinese or white, and ‘virtually nothing else’. [20]   The stark racial and cultural imbalance illustrates how the duality of Sinocentric and Eurocentric racial frames in China intertwined and morphed into a complex cultural phenomenon, which influenced the writing of Basic Music Theory , and by extension, the entire discipline of academic studies of music in China. The book alone was not enough to construct such a far-reaching racial frame; instead, it was a product of precisely that racial frame, born out of China’s unstable relationship with Western culture over the last 200 years—‘sometimes like the devil, but sometimes like a beauty’.[21] This unique and complex fixation led Li Chongguang and other Chinese music theorists at the time to focus solely on music from China and Europe, ignoring vast traditions of music and music theory from other parts of the world. Such a narrow, Eurocentric, and Sinocentric perspective has already been acknowledged and scrutinised by Chinese musicologists. Few have made a clearer observation than Shen Qia, who commented in 1993 that the so-called ‘openness’ of the Chinese music circle has often been a fixation on ‘the West’ as the only frame of reference. This fixation is in fact narrow-minded and conservative.[22] His assessment of the lamentably narrow perspective of musicology in China testifies to the accuracy of my analysis above. Indeed, music scholars in China have not taken up music theories from outside China and the West as valid reference points.   Furthermore, Li Chongguang’s Basic Music Theory  shows a tendency to diminish the cultural identity of ethnic minority groups within China. Of the 139 traditional Chinese musical examples in the book (categorised as folk tunes rather than works of specific, identified composers), only four are identified by ethnicity. The rest are identified by province, despite many being important songs by ethnic minority peoples. Perhaps to promote official narratives, the book credits key Mongolian and Uyghur songs by their respective provinces, not by their ethnicity. The epic folk song ‘Gada Meiren’, for instance, is labelled an ‘Inner Mongolian folk song’, which diminishes the ethnic tensions that the song reflects.[23] Borjigin Burensain, for instance, cast the events described by the lyrics of the song as ‘an ethnic conflict between the Mongols and the Chinese over Mongol land’ and a ‘campaign against Chinese colonisation’.[24] This subtle suppression of ethnic minority identities, intertwining with the Sinocentric and Eurocentric racial frames, forms a spectre of racial-ethnic frames that haunts the book yet has often been overlooked. One can therefore draw parallels between my analysis of Basic Music Theory  and Ewell’s analysis of American music theory textbooks. While the American music theory classroom has been shaped by the white racial frame, its counterpart in China has been influenced by a different yet similarly oppressive racial-ethnic frame born out of the clashes and the eventual fusion between Sinocentrism, Eurocentrism, and Han chauvinism.   4. Conclusion and suggested revisions   In my analysis, I have attempted to reveal the far-reaching impact of the white racial frame and Eurocentrism. The white racial frame is not only a Euro-American problem but also, one can argue, a significant component of the racial-ethnic frame behind modern Chinese music. My analysis therefore calls on musicologists in the West to re-evaluate the impact of the white racial frame and Eurocentrism on music and theory, from a global perspective. The discussions on race and music theory can therefore be conducted on a global scale, expanding from Ewell’s America-centric perspective to a true multicultural dialogue between music scholars from around the world, in order to acknowledge, comprehend, and eventually tackle this problem.   In the same interview where he admitted that China had ‘no (musical) mother tongue’, Yang Yandi remarked that the trend of globalisation has begun in China, and that ignorance of ‘other worlds’, especially the West, is no longer defensible. His call for a better musical understanding of ‘other worlds’ seems to suggest his advocacy for diversity in China’s music theory classroom, but what follows shows a more nuanced picture. Yang was advocating for diversity, yet he insisted on selecting the ‘Western World’ as the world out of all ‘other worlds’ for the Chinese music community to understand.[25] His call for diversity was thus still insinuating the validity of China’s Eurocentric approach to music from ‘other worlds’. Following Ewell’s recommendations for the American music theory community, however, I believe that Yang’s call for a more globalised approach could be expanded to address the racial-ethnic frame in Chinese music theory. The racial-ethnic frame itself, along with its history and impact, needs to be acknowledged and analysed by the community of music scholars in China and, subsequently, taught as the historical component to theory for music students in China. The music theory curriculum itself can be expanded to cover more traditions—for instance, by including music traditions and theoretical frameworks of Indian, African, American, and South-East Asian peoples—rather than focussing solely on China and the Western classical tradition. Such a broadened scope, combined with a more comprehensive understanding of the Western classical traditions, could arguably act as a more inclusive approach to Yang’s problem.   Finally, it is vital that music scholars in China establish effective means of communication with colleagues from across the world. A good start would be introducing more accurate Chinese translations of non-Chinese scholarly texts to music scholars in China, as well as more accurate English translations of Chinese texts to non-Chinese music scholars. Via this potential avenue of collaboration, along with others, problems posed by racial frames in music and music theory can be dissected to reimagine more diverse and inclusive theoretical frameworks of global musical traditions, which in turn could become a new source of musical innovation. David Chu   David Chu is pursuing an MSt in Musicology at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He is interested in the intersection between music and ideology, and in new possibilities in tonality. He served as Assistant Conductor of the Sun Yat-sen University Orchestra from 2016 to 2020 and has composed and orchestrated for a variety of ensembles. [1] Philip A Ewell, ‘Music Theory and The White Racial Frame’ (2020) 26 Music Theory Online < https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.26.2.4 >. [2] ‘Cornish College of The Arts - Music Department’ ( Facebook , 23 June 2020) < https://www.facebook.com/CornishMusic/posts/3297682836937718 > accessed 1 March 2021. [3] Alex Ross, ‘Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy In Classical Music’ ( The New Yorker , 14 September 2020) < https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/black-scholars-confront-white-supremacy-in-classical-music > accessed 1 March 2021. [4] ‘Upcoming Events | 2020 Music Academic Season: Autumn Fusion, 活动预告 2020 音乐学术季秋融’ WeChat < https://archive.vn/H4x38 >, saved from < https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/CjuU82Wd2d90qUdF7KgdIQ > accessed 1 March 2021. NB: All Chinese names and titles are rendered in the Romanised pinyin. Unless otherwise specified, all translations from Chinese into English are mine. [5] Patrick Huang, ‘Philip Ewell’s Musicology Lecture (Oct 27), Philip Ewel 的音乐学讲座 [10.27 的音乐学讲座]’ < https://web.archive.org/web/20201104140239/https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/267960072 > accessed 1 March 2021. [6] Wei Xu, ‘Do Not Use The Racism Label Randomly 不要把种族主义的帽子随便乱戴’ ( Ministry of Foreign Affairs of The People’s Republic Of China , 2018) < https://archive.vn/H4x38 >, saved from < https://www.fmP.R.C.gov.cn/zflt/chn/jlydh/mtsy/t1536004.htm > accessed 1 March 2021. [7] Jane Perlez, ‘With Blackface And Monkey Suit, Chinese Gala On Africa Causes Uproar’ The New York Times  (New York, 16 February 2018) < https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/world/asia/china-africa-blackface-lunar-new-year.html > accessed 1 March 2021. [8] ibid. [9] Guy G Ankerl, Global Communication Without Universal Civilization  (INU Press 2000). [10] Barry Sautman, ‘Anti-Black Racism In Post-Mao China’ (1994) 138 The China Quarterly 413 . [11] Ibram X Kendi, How to Be An Antiracist (Penguin Random House 2019). [12] Hsiao-Hung Pai, ‘The Coronavirus Crisis Has Exposed China’s Long History Of Racism’ Guardian (London, 25 April 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/25/coronavirus-exposed-china-history-racism-africans-guangzhou > accessed 1 March 2021. [13] Yang Yandi, ‘Yang Yandi: Western Music And Its Research In China, 杨燕迪：西方音乐及其研究在中国’ ( Nanjing University Marxist Social Theory Research Center,  南京大学马克思主义社会理论研究中心,   2008) < https://archive.vn/Sf0sI >, saved from < https://ptext.nju.edu.cn/bf/33/c12245a245555/page.htm >. [14] ibid. [15] ibid. [16] Shen Qia, ‘The U-Shaped Journey Of The Idea Of Chinese Music Through The 20th-Century, 二十世纪国乐思想的’, U ‘ 字之路’ (1994) Music Studies, 字之路 67. [17] Li Yuhong, ‘Two Textbooks in The Development Of Basic Music Theory As A Discipline’, 基本乐理’学科发展中的两本教材’ (2005) Music Education In China, 中国音乐教育 33 < http://www.cqvip.com/QK/82024X/20057/16031120.html >. [18] Li Chongguang, Basic Music Theory , 音乐理论基础 (twenty-sixth edn, People’s Music Publishing House 2001). [19] ibid. [20] Ewell (n 1). [21] Shen (n 19). [22] ibid. [23] Li (n 18). [24] Borjigin Burensain, ‘The Complex Structure of Ethnic Conflict In The Frontier: Through The Debates Around The “Jindandao Incident” In 1891’ (2004) 6 Inner Asia 41 < https://doi.org/10.1163/146481704793647171 >. [25] Yang (n 13).

If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Once upon a time … … … a true story … … … I lived in a cave.   A four-day journey on a rattling bus across Europe carried me to Greece when I left London after quitting journalism. It finally became clear the work was imprisoned in a web of commerce, with ideals at best an occasional flimsy afterthought. Truth and justice were liked but not essential. Making money through pandering to thoughtless appetites was. Murdoch’s Fox is the flower of 50 years’ evolution since then.   What is meaningful, true and humane in this labyrinth of life? At seven years old I fell in love with Botticelli’s painting Venus and Mars . The peaceful dream of the gods drawn with such perfect clarity and painted in colours balanced between subtlety and lusciousness, all amazed me with beauty. When I reached 12, Man’s continuing history of inhumanity through war, Holocaust, nuclear bomb, slavery, and starvation horrified and angered me. At 15, Keats’ line from Ode on a Grecian Urn , ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, seemed the key to understanding. Ten years later the doors to my inner life were more fully opened in my cave. Fig 1. Venus and Mars (Sandro Botticelli c 1485, tempera and oil on poplar, 69.2 x 173.4cm). © 2021 The National Gallery, London. This hidden shelter was up a cliff on a rocky island in the middle of the myriad blues of the Aegean Sea. Big enough to house one person, its spiral form had been carved by sun and wind from the limestone escarpment. The sandy floor moulded comfortably to my sleeping body. The pale stone inner tip of the spiral swirled up in front of the opening making a partial screen. Inside, a ledge provided storage for my few belongings and a place for a candle at night. There, alone, I was immersed in the fundamental essences of life—earth, fire, air, and water. Asleep at night embraced by encircling stone, each morning I would be woken by the sudden glare of the sun as it rose above the hills opposite and shone hot on my face. Sparkling air all round, turquoise sea lapped into the cove below my cliff. In such simplicity the connection was forged between my inner being and the great forces outside.   This experience has been coursing through my life ever since, opening me to a Universe in which the miracle of consciousness aligned with the wonder of imagination have evolved in us. Looking to the night sky, its beauty balances out fear of its impossible depths. To observe with the naked eye Saturn 800,000,000 miles away on the other side of the Solar System, as we were able to after twilight for the last months of 2020, is to be transfixed by the beauty of the planet and the idea of its being. Seeing that minute, perfect circle of pale pink light in the darkness confirms we belong here with it. We connect in the pattern of mutual existence, the space between us shrinks, and loneliness is assuaged. We know a little more of where and what we are.   ‘Where are we?’ ‘What are we?’ ‘Why are we?’ These questions have been asked for thousands of years since the first enquiring gaze to a sky filled with stars connected us to its mystery. We know some of the answering stories, but the original words are gone along with sound of song or movement of dance. It is visual art which leaves its permanent mark. Stories willed to us by prehistoric ancestors are those directly told through the beauty, energy, and intelligence of the paintings and engravings made most often in the protective environment of caves.   With the exception of 2,300-year-old Chinese manuscripts concerning cave art, it is barely 150 years since prehistoric tools and artefacts were found by us and intelligently noticed. In 1879 María Sanz de Sautuola and her lawyer father, an amateur prehistorian, discovered the ravishingly beautiful paintings of bison herds on the walls of the Altamira cave in Spain. We do not need to know precise cultural causes for their creation. Why these paintings were made sits wordless in the works themselves. Strong sweeping lines describe with masterful accuracy the muscular forms of the bison. Perfect strokes lead down haunches to delicate cloven hooves which suggest the precision and speed of the animals. Love drove the early cave artists to constantly observe and practice—just as it has continued to drive artists throughout the ages to attempt to capture the mystery of the beauty of life. The Altamira masterpieces are of similar age to the fabulous 17,000-year-old paintings discovered on the walls of the Lascaux caves, France, in 1940. Since the invention of modern dating techniques, there has been a speeding up of discovering further Palaeolithic art in caves all over the world, including recently a 45,000-year-old painting of a magnificent purple pig in Indonesia.   Striving to know when human consciousness was born, we hope to find ourselves back there then to make more sense of being here now. Toolmaking was for a time considered the practice that defined humanity until we discovered that great apes, with whom we share common ancestors, modify natural objects to make tools for obtaining food and even as weapons.   No—the evidence we seek is not in artefacts but in art.   What is art, and from where? It comes from noticing everything around us with our conscious mind and from noticing everything around us with our subconscious mind. It comes from fears, desires, and dreams, the imagination and language that emerged during the separation between us and other animals. Fear became wonder. We turned our experience into recorded form intentionally in rituals of remembering, projecting, and invoking. It is love and beauty, physical and metaphysical—the very heart of being human.   Beauty is life itself resonating with more power than usual. We feel more intensely at the encounter whether the cause is sorrow or joy. In his Poetics  Aristotle said the experience given by the tragedies, a heightened, transformative awareness, opens to catharsis—the cleansing necessary to move on.   Ceremonies and rituals have used all functions of the arts to give access to expanded consciousness so we can let go of fear and embrace being more fully alive.   Recently the art of performance poetry was powerfully set at the centre of much-troubled America in a highly symbolic ritual—the Inauguration of President Biden. The ceremony took place on the stage of the opened cave of the Capitol. The young poet Amanda Gorman, her yellow coat the shaman’s cloak evoking the rising sun after so many months of darkness, her slender hands moving with grace and beauty to the rhythm of her words, entranced those who heard and saw. Her incantation enchanted; a spell to heal us out of sadness towards belief in the unity and goodness of our future.   It is only with principles of justice, the balance of sharing and generosity, that we will be able to build lasting, creative civilisations. This virtue is practiced in abstract form in art through various polarities including symmetry-asymmetry, order-chaos, stasis- kinesis, crystallinity-amorphism, and many others, which reflect the constant juggling of forces as life changes over time and new patterns emerge.   Reading about the 100,000-year-old painters’ workshop in the Blombos Caves, South Africa, filled me with the joy of fellowship. Adding pleasure to my sense of connection is a photo showing the landscape to be similar to that around my cave in Greece.[1] The organised system of paint production that was in hand in Blombos Cave suggests it was both studio and laboratory; art as the first science. Analysis of paint on neatly stacked pallets shows that animal fats were used as binders for the ochre pigments which were ground there. For the past 600 years linseed oil has been used to bind oil paint. The methods are closely allied.   Art has been the binder of human history for hundreds of millennia, fundamental to cultures in every part of the world. It connects us to our origins both through looking and through practice. It finds pattern in the unpredictable so that we can feel at ease, not just survive. It exercises human hand, eye, mind, and heart and supports self-discovery for confident participation in the world. This is what makes it so important in education.   The creative mind needs exercising as do all other parts of the body.   A function of art is to open up the cave in every one of us.   A major function of education is to help people discover their innate creativity. Art revolves round the exploration that draws these abilities out, validating imagination as well as contributing to intellectual learning and evolving morality. Advances made by educators during the past 40 years have focused on how to stimulate students’ creativity to enable them to participate more actively in their own education. Recently an unimaginative government has reversed this approach, re-establishing old, narrow formulae which are easier to administer and measure but disadvantage large groups of people. Now emphasised is training—for reiteration of data, rather than education—for expression of understanding. Two subjects which have been cut significantly are art and music.   Art has defined us for more than 300,000 years. How can we possibly expect to nurture civilisations if we remove from the process the core characteristic of our humanity?   Art practice uses body as well as mind. Eyes and hands are exercised by use which feeds neural pathways in the brain. Its combined physical, emotional, and intellectual stimuli give people of widely differing abilities a chance to find their way through the maze and to share their discoveries with each other. Collaborative projects can provide a format wherein students initially explore and express themselves individually, then form groups to exchange and design together, reinforcing the sense of belonging with pleasure of shared responsibility.   Academic subjects taught with art can engage students at many levels. Shortly before the first COVID-19 lockdown I was privileged to teach chemistry through art to a large group of 11-13-year-olds. The project was in praise of the Periodic Table of the Elements, which had filled me with wonder when I was their age. I wanted these students, too, to be inspired by the beauty of the structure of the atomic universe. Each participant chose an element to research and create as sculpture in response. The commitment of the group, the varied beauty of their sculptures, and the way they helped each other and discussed their methods and meanings, were inspirational. Academic children deserve encouragement to open and explore their inner poetic world with the practical exercises art offers; the less obviously academic deserve opportunities to identify with the processes of science which can be made more accessible through art. Young, inattentive minds can open suddenly to academic work after practicing art. Fig 2. Hexagons in Arpeggio (Willow Winston 2018, brass, variable configuration) at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2018. One example of the innumerable possible static positions. © Willow Winston. Fig 3. Hexagons in Arpeggio (Willow Winston 2018, brass, variable configuration) at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2018. Sculpture changed by visitors into different configurations. © Willow Winston. Simple exercises can open up experience in surprising ways. I often ask classes to start drawing with eyes closed. You never know where it will take you and that is the point. You don’t need to know where you are going. You just need something that sets you on the journey, that gives you confidence to dare.   Society publicly declares its relationship with art through the environment it makes. Psychological spaces erected throughout cities point to the quality of our shared inner life. Unfortunately, that is becoming increasingly mechanistic. Undue profit prevails. Buildings are the new investment bank: 3D savings accounts that do not cater to the community visually, socially, or spiritually. Increasingly we neglect how to integrate with nature, the principle by which all beautiful cities of the world were built.   London City Island in the River Lea was developed recently on the dominating monetary principle. What an opportunity missed! No visual harmony is attempted between curving river and concrete. There stand dull boxes, most with dull-coloured cladding, seven to 27 storeys high, crowded top-heavy onto the slender peninsula. Strictly identical windows divide each façade. No change in rhythm, it is all spondee—the monotonous meter used by Virgil in his poem the Aeneid  to emphasise the brute horror of the one-eyed cyclops in his cave.   Why are we building towers that resemble high prisons? If we must build on a vast scale to make our civilisations function economically, much higher standards of public aesthetics are essential or we will destroy what we love. However, without laws that loosen the grip of corporations which control most of the building industry, without making planning processes transparent and truly accessible, without genuinely including communities in choices during development, and without splitting enormous profits, currently made by the few, for fairer sharing with communities where development takes place, our yearning for widespread humane architecture will be unrequited.   From junior education onwards, Environmental Studies, using both art and science, should become a core subject. By infusing art into a critical curriculum more of the population may consciously demand fulfilling environments, as with growing science awareness they are demanding action to counter climate change. These go hand in hand.   An imagined international cooperative, www.Super-Bauhaus.com,  would collate world heritage building design for study in every architecture and engineering school. Paintbrush and pencil would be used exclusively one day each week with some designs made with left or non-dominant hand to banish habit and release the unexpected. World music, too, would be included in courses to promote deeper exploration of rhythm in every aspect of building. Dance, including Laban’s theories on the body moving through Platonic geometries, would open minds to how shaped space affects emotion.   Effective application of these studies for large-scale building will require future generations of computers to incorporate organic function and accessible personal programming. Individual creativity could then be applied more directly than current limited, predictive programmes allow. The human race, of infinite variety, abilities, and potential, is a treasure of the world’s future. Dedicated to beauty and truth through art and science, the cave and tower could integrate in harmony. Fig 4. Thames Tide Rising (Willow Winston 2004). John Laing Equion Head Office, London. Willow Winston   Wide-ranging art practice, including engraving, painting, and theatre design, laid the foundations of Willow Winston’s sculpture. Her metal constructions embody in material form the beauty and emotional power of abstract mathematical concept. With work in public collections in the USA, the UK, and Canada, she has exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic and taught from postgraduate to primary level. Committed to collaborating on innovative educational methods, she is developing ways of using art to teach sciences. Recently she was appointed Patron of Centrepieces Arts Project for Mental Health. [1] Bruno David, Cave Art  (Thames & Hudson 2017).

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.

Maggie Hoag is Deputy General Counsel, Americas, at the auction house Christie’s. She studied art law at Stanford, and was involved in the sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting  Salvator Mundi for a historic $450 million.   CJLPA : Tell us a little about your background. How did your experiences culminate in a career at Christie’s, and could you summarize your career progression there?   Maggie Hoag : I have a university background in languages (French and Italian), art history, and architecture. After graduation, I joined Christie’s’ Chicago office as an intern. While in that position, I worked closely with the Trusts and Estates group, who focused on initiating and maintaining strong relationships both with clients and their estate planning advisors. I knew that I wanted to find a career that focused on art, but I wasn’t interested, nor did I think I would be successful, in being a specialist nor a curator, rather desiring a more business-focused role. I discovered that there was such a thing as ‘art law’ and—while I didn’t plan on ever being an attorney—the concepts intrigued me. I applied only to law schools that had a strong focus on art law and intellectual property law. At Stanford, I trained under one of the pioneers of the area, Professor John Henry Merryman, who focused heavily on cultural property law. I went on to find externships in the industry and then start my career at Hughes Hubbard & Reed in New York. They had a very strong museum law practice and I helped build a roster of clients including museums, cultural organizations, galleries, collectors, and artists. After six years in private practice, I landed at Christie’s. And now, it’s ten years later!   CJLPA : Could you describe your current role?   MH : My current role is Deputy General Counsel, Americas. Initially, when I started at Christie’s, I acted as the legal liaison for a variety of specialist departments, working as a partner though the auction and private sale consignment process, through the sale itself, and then handling any post-sale issues. Now my role is both more focused and more broad—it certainly diversified over the years. A few particular focus points are, firstly, playing the legal lead for the 20/21 department—which includes art from the Impressionist period to the present day—as well as spearheading the legal oversight of cultural property issues, primarily for the Antiquities and African/ Oceanic departments. I take a lead position on identifying deal risks, particularly with large multimillion-dollar collections of art from trusts and estates. I handle bits of employment law and intellectual property and—lately—have been wrapping my head around NFTs, blockchain, and cryptocurrency!   CJLPA : Where does your passion for law come from?   MH : Honestly, I don’t know that I can definitely state that I have a ‘passion for law’. I do have a passion for art and a passion for making deals happen with both sides coming out as pleased as possible. I love to solve problems and find pragmatic business-savvy solutions. I very much enjoy getting to know our clients and their legal representatives and figuring out how to navigate a deal that addresses their particular concerns while keeping my client, Christie’s as a whole, in a safe and profitable position. One fact about being a lawyer—you really are simply bringing a certain way of thinking logically to a situation. To me, law is more of a mindset. There is a misconception that lawyers get in the way and that their only role is to scare everyone about risks, but that is actually only a type of lawyering and not a type to which I subscribe.   CJLPA : What are some career highlights for you? And what is the most rewarding part of your role?   MH : I would have to highlight a few stellar consignments, including the Ebsworth Collection, the greatest privately owned collection of American modernist art that ever came to market, which set thirteen artist records with Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey  selling for over $91 million, the sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi , which sold for an historic $450 million to a deep pool of bidders and required what seemed like endless negotiation and research, and—of course—our recent sale of STAN, a nearly complete 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, for nearly $32 million, nearly four times its pre-sale high estimate. STAN showed several aspects of what makes working at Christie’s so rewarding—many different teams coming together to figure out the complex legal and operational challenges involved with selling a dinosaur, and a novel pairing of our head of Scientific Instruments, Globes and Natural History department in London with our Chairman of our now-titled 20/21 department in New York. The research started in January 2019. The sale happened in October 2020. We had planned to have lines around Rockefeller Center so that New Yorkers and tourists alike could view this glorious beast. Instead, we got hit with COVID—no visitors allowed! Our operational team worked their magic so that STAN could face the Plaza through our windows. The bidding went on for more than 10 minutes, which is a lifetime in the auction world.   CJLPA : How are you involved in promoting art law to a new generation, or future practitioners?   MH : I take mentorship very seriously, on both a formal and informal level. I speak with law students and early law school graduates on a weekly basis as they look to shape their own career paths. Interestingly, I recently had the chance to hire onto my team two of my former interns whose interest in the field continued through their early careers until they each made their way back to Christie’s as in-house counsel. On a separate level, I speak at a variety of workshops and symposia, familiarizing more seasoned attorneys who may have never heard of or practiced in the field.   CJLPA : What tools do students need to practice art law? Where do you see most art lawyers come from: career changers or those who join the field as soon as they’re qualified?   MH : As noted earlier, I speak with many students who are interested in the field. They want me to say that having a passion in art and art law is enough. It’s not. The most important tool is that you need to be a good lawyer—a true generalist with the ability to make difficult and reasoned decisions. Other key skills are knowing when you can make a gut decision and when you need outside specialized advice. Having the confidence to make those decisions and being able to communicate to your clients why you are taking the position that you are is sacrosanct. A junior attorney has to be comfortable with herself in order to be respected by her clients. As far as joining the field, at least in the US, training at an established law firm is key. Heading straight from law school to a museum or auction house is both unlikely and impractical. An attorney practicing in-house at a museum or auction house does not have time to provide adequate training. While I no longer work the same immensely long hours and weekends as I did in private practice, any in-house attorney will tell you that there is no break to the day.   CJLPA : Why should a student study art law? What would you hope their next steps would be?   MH : Art law is usually a semester-long course so there isn’t much room to ‘specialize’ in it while at law school. However, a student can take advantage of the many internships and externships that cultural institutions offer (albeit unpaid!). Then you can see if you like it and hone in on what you like about it. For me, I know one of my skills is drafting contractual documents that don’t read like they are from 250 years ago—‘heretofore’, ‘whereas’—but instead make sense to a businessperson. That said, if I were drafting contracts for the sale of widgets that make a car engine run, I would go mad. At the end of the day, I am working on a contract for a masterwork of art that may have been in the same collection for generations. I get to see and love the art when it arrives at Christie’s. I get to participate in the excitement of someone else competitively bidding in a packed room full of collectors and dealers for the chance to hang that masterwork on her own wall. As far as next steps, speaking with art law practitioners is a good step, with those who are in-house or at a law firm, and with those in transactional and litigation practices.   CJLPA : Are there legal considerations in art law that you don’t find in other areas?   MH : Yes, a few. There are issues of authenticity and provenance. There are laws specific to cultural property and endangered species. In New York City, we have auction regulations with which to abide. No doubt we have to consider copyright laws in both the art and our images. The art market seems to be moving to a more regulated environment—certainly on the anti-money laundering front. Like the legal world generally, there is a lot to know, and you have to keep a finger on the pulse. Alexander (Sami) Kardos-Nyheim, the interviewer, is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of CJLPA .

In his seminal 1961 work The Destruction of the European Jews , Raul Hilberg proposed a thesis that sought to explain a perceived lack of Jewish resistance. Jews in the ghettos of Europe, he suggested, ‘hoped somehow that the German drive would expend itself. This hope was founded on a 2000-year old experience. In exile the Jews had always been a minority, always in danger, but they learned they could avert or survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies’.[1] In the case of the Nazis, this, for Hilberg, became a fatal assumption. It was, however, an uncomfortable argument, one which undermined suggestions of Jewish defiance and appeared to install an image of almost supine historical passivity in its place. Two responses in particular can be said to have emerged. One was to emphasise the immense difficulty involved in open resistance, particularly when armed. Weapons were nearly impossible to source in ghettos and camps, German forces were fully capable of destroying any rebels, and it was far from clear what the Nazis intended until for many it was too late. The second was to broaden the meaning of ‘resistance’ beyond narrower definitions. A process undertaken by scholars such as Meir Dworzecki and Nachman Blumental through the 1960s, it was often encapsulated by the Hebrew term amidah  (roughly, ‘stand’). Defiance, it was argued, could in fact be ‘spiritual’.[2] Now, it seemed, Jewish victims had claim to resistance after all.   Predictably, the bounds of ‘spiritual resistance’ have since then remained amorphous, relying less on a set inventory of actions, and more on perceived intent. Shirli Gilbert’s description of the concept’s historiographical usage, though focussed on music, is essentially valid for all activities which are said to comprise it, namely anything that serves as ‘a life affirming survival mechanism through which they [victims] asserted solidarity in the face of persecution, the will to live, and the power of the human spirit’. Acts which supposedly expressed this range from clandestine education and the creation of art and music, to the writing of diaries or chronicles and the splitting of rations.[3] Though it could be as simple as a general resolution to live with dignity, it is particularly these cultural and intellectual activities, so well studied in the context of the ghettos, that have dominated discussion of spiritual resistance and which appear more in redemptive post-war narratives from survivors—as Yiddish poet Leivick Halpern declared, ‘In mines, in bunkers, in sewage pipes, on the threshold of the gas chambers Jews sought strength in prayer, in poetry, in song’.[4] Central too to the idea, therefore, is its status as a collective phenomenon, enacted on behalf of all Jewry. For Nechama Tec, ‘what they [Jews] shared was a belief that no one was alone and that, with the help of others, resilience could turn into resistance—acting not just on behalf of oneself to survive, but on behalf of an entire community of people’.[5] Spiritual resistance by extension takes on an almost indestructible quality, which transcends the death of any one victim or the destruction of the body, and which characterises at the very least a broad swathe of Jewish victims’ lives under National Socialism.   In some respects, this has marked a welcome shift. Unlike unrealistic expectations of armed rebellion, spiritual resistance allows a more varied appreciation of how Jews might present defiance in the face of enormous persecution. There remains, however, much to criticise in the concept. By moving away from the often redemptive, expurgated accounts of post-war testimonies, whose narratives are perhaps inherently exceptional by virtue of their tellers’ survival, we can instead consider material written during the period in question. These sources contain an immediacy, uncertainty, and even banality of experience which better characterises the lives of most Jews in Nazi ghettos. This shifted focus can then let us identify the concept’s various flaws. Central among them is its tendency to overlook the physical reality of the ghettos and camps, assuming a sort of immortality to spiritual resistance which ignores how bodily exhaustion and degradations severely limited one’s capacity to engage in its practice. In turn, this extreme scarcity produced nearly inescapable divisions and hierarchies, precluding any simply collective face to resistance. Not only did this limit access to acts which might constitute spiritual resistance, such as cultural performance, it also affected their content. While statements from the likes of Halpern assume these activities were somehow innately dignifying, they could in fact reflect the grim, despairing reality of the ghetto. When what little remained of spiritual resistance is placed in this holistic context, it emerges as a fleeting, uncharacteristic experience in lives defined instead by hunger, division, and degradation.   *   Jacob Clemenski, member of the socialist Jewish Labour Bund, described post-war a particularly striking visit to a Warsaw Ghetto cabaret.   When we reached the nightclub the street was dark. My escort suddenly said to me: ‘Be careful not to step on a corpse’. When I opened the door the light blinded me. Every table was covered by a white tablecloth. Fat characters sat at them eating chicken, duck, or fowl … The audience crowding the tables was made up of the aristocracy of the ghetto - big-time smugglers, high Polish officers, and all sorts of big shots … The audience ate, drank, and laughed as if it had no worries.[6]   Though likely an embellished account, it approximates the truth—in the ghetto, spaces to escape its realities were often exclusive to the point of the grotesque. While a majority starved, a select caste could at least momentarily enjoy comforts that staved off the spiritual degradation others experienced. Indeed, by April 1941, Emmanuel Ringelblum, organiser of the secret Warsaw Ghetto archive Oneg Shabbat (‘Sabbath Delight’), could list 61 different cafés which provided food and music to a privileged clientele, often dependent on authorities in the Judenrat or even the Gestapo.[7] Nor was this unique to Warsaw. The Łódź Ghetto Chronicle, which documented life in the second largest of the Nazi ghettos, noted on 24 November 1943 how ‘small centres for the cultivation of music have sprung up over time; to be sure, only for a certain upper stratum’.[8]   Even more open performances tended to be marred by reminders of these inequalities. Dawid Sierakowiak, a young communist whose diaries provide invaluable insight into Łódź, recorded his attendance on 27 May of a Krawiecka Street concert. ‘The whole of select society gathered, bloated and dressed up. The gap between various classes of people in the ghetto grows wider and wider. Some steal to feed themselves, others feed themselves officially, while the rest are swelling up and dying of hunger’.[9] Hierarchy of a more formalised sort was also used to intrude upon cultural and educational efforts in the ghettos, often rendering them exercises in self-promotion. The Łódź Chronicle, which was almost certainly vetted by Judenrat head Chaim Rumkowksi, provides numerous examples of this. A September 1941 entry reporting on a children’s play ended by noting that, ‘After the Chairman’s speech, the little children made a ring around him on the stage and danced joyously accompanied by the sound of music and cheers for the ghetto’s first citizen’.[10] For Łódź diarist Leon Hurwitz, the motivation behind cultural programming was clear—‘the dictator [Rumkowski] organises concerts so that he can deliver speeches’.[11] Such divisions, however, were not solely the impositions of a ghetto elite upon a silently resentful majority. Indeed, what could morally constitute spiritual resistance was often disputed at the time. This would also refute any monolithic image of Jewry as presenting solely unified defiance, and it complicates easy assumptions that certain acts are necessarily resistive. For Hermann Kruk, a conservative Bundist in Vilna, proposals to open a ghetto theatre amidst such suffering appeared outrageous, and he resolved to boycott the event alongside the local Bund—‘the streets of the ghetto are to be strewn with leaflets: “About today’s concert. You don’t make a theatre in a graveyard!” The police and the artists will amuse themselves, and the Vilna ghetto will mourn’.[12] Riven by internal acrimony and inequality, spiritual resistance almost never presented the straightforwardly collective defiance that its historiographical proponents demand.   Under these pressures, it is perhaps unsurprising that the content of such cultural performance rarely tallied with a model of spiritual resistance. Shirli Gilbert’s powerful study of music in the Holocaust moves beyond Romantic notions of art as an inherently pure expression of high emotion. Though some concerts would play Beethoven and Mahler (in the Warsaw orchestra’s case, only to earn extra money for food), many of the most widespread and inescapable forms of ghetto music were far from uplifting or affirmatory of human dignity.[13] One song particularly popular in Warsaw, titled ‘Money, money’, focussed on the squalor and materialism of the ghetto, with lines such as ‘Money, money, money is the best thing, / Back home I ate oranges / Today I am eaten by lice and bedbugs … / The Jewish policeman is just a scoundrel, / Puts you on the train and sends you away to a camp’.[14] Though perhaps tinged with gallows humour, its basis remained a sense of grief and desperation. Indeed, in a survey of original songs composed in the Warsaw Ghetto, Gilbert concludes that ‘their spirit was most often one of sadness, despair, and cynicism’.[15] Their performance by street beggars and children in many case only compounded their depressed tone, and the activity was evidently one motivated by desperation for some sustenance rather than any desire to display spiritual defiance. The Łódź Chronicle documents a similar episode in an entry of 5 December 5 1941 on ‘the ghetto’s latest hit song’, the content of which ‘tells of the yekes  [recently arrived German Jews], forever hungry and searching for food, and the “locals” who make fun of them and quite often take advantage of their naïveté and unfamiliarity with local customs’.[16] Cultural performance here, far from being innately defiant, could in fact express contempt for the ghetto’s outgroups.   Moving beyond artistic creations to the practice of prayer furthers this picture of how content often became divorced from spiritual resistance. While prayer might appear an exemplary case of the phenomenon, the exhortation involved often tended more towards pleading for salvation than towards any pledge to resist Nazi oppression. Many of the best-preserved sources on the ghettos are from socialists and intellectuals less likely to be fervently religious, but indications nonetheless exist of a primary focus upon salvation rather than resistance. As Chaim Kaplan, a Warsaw Ghetto diarist and educator, recorded, the city’s Jews ‘poured its supplications before its Father in Heaven in accordance with the ancient custom of Israel’ following the announcement of the ghetto’s creation.[17] The rabbi of Grabow’s letter to the Łódź ghetto, warning inhabitants of the existence of the Chelmno death camp, finishes meanwhile with the lines ‘O Man, throw off your rags, sprinkle your head with ashes, or run through the streets and dance with madness. I am so wearied by the sufferings of Israel, my pen can write no more. My heart is breaking. But perhaps the Almighty will take pity and save the “last remnants of our People.” Help us, O Creator of the World!’[18] Characterised by supplication more than defiance, even prayer eschews easy identification with spiritual resistance.   An examination of the act of writing can bring together these two criticisms of spiritual resistance—that of compromised collectivity and that of compromised content. Often construed as a form of witnessing that promoted solidarity in the face of Nazi erasure, it is generally exemplified by the creation of Oneg Shabbat or by the likes of Kaplan, who declared in his diary his undying duty to ‘write a scroll of agony in order to remember the past in the future’.[19] It is in this context that historians such as Zoë Waxman can refer to ‘the collective response of other ghetto diarists’ as compared to those embedded in ghetto hierarchy, whose morally compromised roles ensure, according to Waxman, that they ‘“write not of a shared sense of suffering, but of isolation and disconnection’.[20] It would, however, appear that many Jews unconnected to ghetto hierarchy felt no particular impulse to express a sense of collective solidarity or dignified resistance. Sierakowiak’s diary is a case in point. His entries castigate ‘the rotten, bourgeois-bureaucratic basis on which the ghetto exists, and on which it will perish’, though he himself is quick to take advantage of it where possible. Entries range from angry documentation of popular abuses of the ghetto’s coupon system, to decrying Rumkowski’s creation of an exclusive and well-supplied ‘rest home’ for ghetto officials as ‘a disgraceful blotch on the carcass of the administration’.[21] Already possessing little faith in ‘native’ Łódź Jews, his initial consideration of new Western arrivals as ‘all Christians and Nazis’ is hardly indicative of common feeling either.[22] Yet perhaps his most startling repudiation of solidarity comes with his frail mother’s deportation, upon which his loyalties narrowed to her, and his misanthropy broadened to almost everyone remaining. His blame immediately fell upon foreign Jews as well as the Nazis. Her fate had been sealed ‘solely because of the evil hearts of two Czech Jews, the doctors who came to examine us’. His grief was compounded by the fact that others, even the dozens of children elsewhere in their apartment block, were not seized in her place. Wishing for a pogrom if the confusion might release her, he noted, ‘What do I care about another mother’s cry when my own mother has been taken from me!? I don’t think there can be ample revenge for this’.[23]   Sierakowiak’s increasing disregard for any collective empathy was something observed and acted out by many other diarists. Two other diaries from Łódź, written respectively by an unknown boy and unknown girl, come to similar conclusions. As the anonymous girl wrote, ‘You may fall and nobody will pick you up. A human being is worthless, dozens of them are not important. People are disgusting. Everybody cares only for himself’.[24] The anonymous boy, who wrote his entries in four languages in the margins of a French novel, saw events as a general condemnation of mankind. Though he sensed at points a ‘collective suffering’ among the Jews, his outlook was grim. ‘I am already unfortunately convinced’, he remarked, ‘that humanity (without exception, I believe, and the rest of it could behave in similar circumstances much like the Germans) is a sordid rabble of greedy beasts devoid of any pity or mercy’.[25] Perhaps particularly telling, however, is the fact that even projects such as Oneg Shabbat, which Waxman identifies as an exemplar of collective testimony, denounce the Jewish community for cowardice and division. In an entry for the archive entitled ‘The destruction of Warsaw’ documenting the massive deportations of later 1942, Yiddish novelist Yehoshua Perle declared, ‘Three times, 100,000 people lacked the courage to say: No. Each of them was out to save his own skin. Each one was ready to sacrifice even his own father, his own mother, his own wife and children’.[26] Though the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 did substantially change subsequent narratives, it is a passage that illustrates well how collective form did not necessarily imply content to match. Instead, it could speak exactly of that ‘isolation and dislocation’ which Waxman attributes solely to compromised, hierarchical voices.   Given the unromanticised content which written sources tended to record, it follows that their motivation was rarely as simple as bearing collective testimony. Instead, the reason for keeping a diary was often an attempt to ensure one’s own emotional survival. This approaches an individualised, introspective sort of spiritual resistance. As Jeffrey Shandler notes in his study of the autobiographies of Jewish youth before the Holocaust, contemporary literary culture often impelled the opposite of a collective response—‘the act of reading almost invariably correlates with a marked turn toward introspection’ and ‘the discovery of a language with which to depict the inner self’, a development which in turned spurred the keeping of diaries.[27] For the anonymous girl, the idea of writing on behalf of Jewish community was evidently foreign; as she noted on 10 March 1942, ‘I talked to Mrs. Robard for a long while and quite involuntarily I let slip that I was writing a diary. She said she would like to read it. I’d made a silly mistake. I don’t want anybody to know about it and nobody is going to read it’.[28] Sierakowiak, meanwhile, dismissed the idea of leaving the ghetto for ‘work in Poznan’ partly because of his weakened strength, and partly because of the literary life he sporadically sustained: ‘I would miss my books and “letters”, notes and copybooks. Especially this diary’.[29] Even Kaplan, significantly older and self-consciously a historical witness, found at points a similar role for his diary, noting, ‘This journal is my life, my friend and ally. I would be lost without it. I pour my innermost thoughts and feelings into it, and this brings relief’.[30] Oneg Shabbat, meanwhile, again presents an unexpectedly mixed picture. For Ringelblum, his group’s exposure of Nazi exterminations to the foreign press was far from a universally redeeming achievement. It only meant that their deaths would not ‘be meaningless like the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews’.[31] Israel Liechtenstein, a contributor to Oneg Shabbat, reasserted its collective creed, asking in his last will and testament amid the Summer 1942 deportations, “May we be the redeemers of all the rest of the Jews in the whole world”. However, his conflicted sentiments are revealed in a reversion to a model of testimony as an individualised, exclusive act later in the document. He declares, ‘I only want remembrance, so that my family, brother and sister abroad, may know what has become of my remains. I want my wife to be remembered … Now together with me, we are preparing to receive death’.[32] Motivation for writing was never, therefore, as clear-cut as a simple desire to represent and immortalise all Jewry. Instead, its basis was often deeply and exclusively personal.   Moving beyond the psychology of the individual to consider that of the ghetto as whole further indicates why spiritual resistance foundered. The ephemerality of hopeful moods, dissipated by constant panics or disasters, posed particular challenges. Indeed, Jews within the ghetto often lacked what might be termed emotional autonomy—that is to say, a capacity for self-constructed, selective ‘spiritual’ development independent of terrible events which forced a response, often of grief or despair. For all Sierakowiak’s attempts to use literature and learning to provide comfort and find purpose, the final anguished lines of his entry on his mother’s deportation testify to its limits: ‘even the greatest rainfall can’t wash away a completely broken heart, and nothing will fill up the eternal emptiness in the soul, brain, mind, and heart that is created by the loss of one’s most beloved person’.[33] Josef Zelkowicz’s account of Łódź ghetto deportations in September 1942 demonstrates on a broader basis how quickly collective hopes and efforts might be raised and then dashed. Following news that the ill were to be deported, Zelkowicz records a strange, unified energy as the ghetto inhabitants set out to warn the rest of the community: ‘No one walked through the streets—everyone ran. And who had the strength or the time to run—No one at all!—So we took to the air ... Our wings were clipped at their roots, and yet we flew’. The endeavour was, however, quickly spoiled, in large part by the actions of the Jewish Police. ‘Hundreds of Jewish policemen stand guard; the executioners can do their work in peace. No one will hinder them … Now all who come running find their wings truly clipped … their throats issue such strange, crude, entirely non-human sounds ... It is incomprehensible how so many tears can come from weakened and exhausted people who haven’t the strength to breathe’.[34] Zelkowicz’s metaphor of wings collapses as the futility of the effort is revealed, and almost animalistic grief and helplessness returns. It was a reaction similar to that which the anonymous boy in Łódź recorded in more muted tones on 15 July 1944. Having been relieved at the end of deportations, his happiness was dashed by reports of a letter which described the mass execution of Jews. ‘I was overcome with joy but a few hours later’, he noted, ‘this joy of mine was spoilt’.[35] If spiritual resistance had to be sustained to truly characterise Jewish life in the ghetto, then it was this emotional fragility and shifting mood which often hindered it. As the Łódź Chronicle remarked, ‘The ghetto… lost the habit of thinking more than a few hours ahead’.[36]   What, therefore, was left of spiritual resistance in the ghettos? The admission that its practice was never remotely as collective, straightforward, or characteristic of ghetto life as historiography often suggests, does not demand its existence be entirely discounted. For certain individuals, such as Yitshok Rudashevski, it was a genuine and central mode of thought. Engaged deeply in Vilna communist youth clubs, he spoke with an optimism very rare in other diaries. As he noted on 11 December 1942, ‘We sat at meagre tables and ate baked pudding and coffee and were so happy, so happy. Song after song resounded… We have proved that from the ghetto there will not emerge a youth broken in spirit’.[37] Indeed, it appears that those involved in such groups were perhaps most likely to feel a sense of solidarity and defiance. It was in similar circumstances that Sierakowiak could lecture on Lenin to his young comrades or contemplate active resistance, even if he eventually rejected it.[38] Another strong case for spiritual resistance is made by charities such as ZTOS (Jewish Society for Social Welfare), CENTOS (Federation of Associations for the Care of Jewish Orphans in Poland), and TOZ (‘Safeguarding the Health of the Jewish Population’), which continued to operate in the ghettos, with German permission.[39] CENTOS, to take one example, was by the summer of 1941 serving 30,000 hot meals a day, with hot milk for 1,000 undernourished children.[40] Judging from Kaunas ghetto’s charitable sanitary organisation, the motivation may well have been consciously resistive. As one of its volunteer doctors put it, their activities aimed to ensure ‘that the young people should emerge from the ghetto in the glorious future, not sick, broken or weakened, but healthy, both physically and spiritually’.[41] It is also important to recognise the remarkable extent of reading and learning in the ghettos. Sierakowiak could devour Schopenhauer and learn several languages at once, while the anonymous girl from Łódź recorded how her friend, before being deported, passed her ‘many scientific books’ along with ‘the diaries of her friend and her friend’s brother’.[42] For some, this could present a method of mental escape, just as how certain inhabitants might find imperfect solace in the flawed cultural events of the ghetto. To discount such ghetto cultures in an effort to present an exclusively ‘dark’ reading of events tends towards the ahistorical.   Such admissions, however, should not prevent considering these phenomena in careful context. While Jewish charity efforts were impressive, they were rarely prohibited and could do little to prevent extreme hunger and desperation for a vast number. In Łódź, the Chronicle could baldly state by May 1942 that ‘the great majority of the ghetto is starving’, while Corni estimates that by the year’s close 760,000 had already died of ‘natural causes’ in Polish ghettos alone.[43] Moreover, whether many of these activities, particularly reading and schooling, were genuinely conceived of as spiritual resistance by those who engaged in them, can seem dubious. This suggests the term is better understood as a retrospective label applied by historians, but comparatively unrecognised by those in the ghettos. Indeed, it is very hard to find more than one or two authors who explicitly employ terms such as ‘resistance’ or ‘defiance’ in this context. For both Sierakowiak and Rudashevski, these activities were often simply a way to pass the day. As the former noted in typical fashion on 19 April 1941, ‘There is no work, only rain. I’m wandering around, idling all day long. Together with a group of friends, Communists, we’ve started to learn Esperanto’.[44] For Rudasehvski, meanwhile, writing on 17 September 1942, ‘It is a terrible time when you cannot settle down to some kind of work and you waste days on nothing’.[45] While defiance did enter the latter’s rhetoric as his involvement in communist youth clubs continued, it appears that those elements of ghetto life which might seem to survive as spiritual resistance, were often the least conscious or articulated. To categorise them as resistive, therefore, may simply divorce them from the reality in which they were actually understood.   Even had reading and learning always constituted defiance, however, they were still restricted. Attempts at schooling, for example, often cited as spiritually resistive, still constituted a severely limited enterprise undertaken in totally unfit classrooms. In Łódź, the proportion of children in elementary education was slightly higher than the fifth or so taught in Warsaw, but schools were banned by Rumkowski by the summer of 1942 amid massive deportations and fear they reduced the number available to work.[46] For the high school classes of 1939-41, only 700 students registered in the ghetto ‘gymnasium’. In a population of 160,000 or so, these were not significant figures.[47] Ghetto writing was, similarly, almost certainly a minority activity. As Waxman admits, ‘no study of testimony can be comprehensive, as the vast majority of victims perished without ever writing down their experiences’.[48] The fact, moreover, that some attempted to represent all Jewry in their accounts had little relevance to the experience of the vast majority to which they laid claim, unaware as it was of activities such as Oneg Shabbat. Even more formalised events only constituted at most a few hours a month for the majority of inhabitants, marred by unwelcome reminders of reality. Sierakowiak’s remark that the Krawiecka Street concert ‘was just better background for meditation on the theme “what I would be eating now if there were no war…”’ is but one example which belies the Chronicle’s more hopeful assessments.[49] Ultimately, spiritual resistance could do little in its limited expressions to cure the ghetto’s iniquities. As Adam Czerniakow wrote on 8 July 1942, ‘I am reminded of a film: a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz piece. I have made up my mind to emulate the captain’.[50]   *   In this vein, it is worth briefly exploring what did  characterise Jewish lives in the ghettos. This will further demonstrate the minimal salience of ‘spiritual resistance’ to the large majority of inhabitants. While it is perhaps dangerous to identify any experiences of too specific a sort, the most common on a general level appear to be hunger, division, and degradation. It was the first of these, hunger, and especially the murderous scarcity that emerged in all ghettos (with the partial exception of Theresienstadt), which induced many of these communities’ worst dysfunctions. It is not therefore surprising that food became the central, endlessly recorded preoccupation of almost all ghetto sources. As Kaplan remarked, ‘Our constant song—potatoes! ... It is our whole life. When I am alone in my room for a few moments of quiet, the echo of that word continues in my ears. Even in my dreams it visits me’.[51] The desperate tactics to obtain more rations were grimly noted by Adam Czerniakow, head of the Warsaw Judenrat. ‘In the public assistance shelters’, he wrote, ‘mothers are hiding dead children under beds for 8 days’.[52] Indeed, such were the pressures created by extreme shortage that resentment within the ghetto fractured the family unit, extending beyond the usual targets of foreign Jews and the Judenrat. The Chronicle’s very first entry, for example, recorded an eight-year-old boy informing on his parents to the Jewish Police, demanding they be punished for stealing his food.[53] It was an experience shared by the anonymous boy too, consumed by guilt over eating his younger sister’s food, and one which Seriakowiak recorded with increasing anger towards his father, whose greed he blamed for ‘pushing mum into her grave’.[54] Division did not, it must be noted, imply ‘atomisation’—that is to say, a total breakdown of all networks. Vital connections remained which sustained Polish Jews and excluded their Western peers, ensuring that the former were at points literally half as likely to die of hunger.[55] Yet these networks were hardly likely to lead to sustained armed resistance, which characterised ghetto life even less than its spiritual counterpart. Undertaken at desperate moments where the choice was liquidation or a last-stand fight, it generally involved small numbers. Of the 50,000-60,000 Jews still living in Warsaw’s ghetto in April 1943, between 250 and 800 took up arms.[56]   It is in this context therefore, that common feeling and compassion tended to dissolve. The general reaction to the ending of deportations provides a particularly striking case of this. Rather than prolonged grief for those taken, the typical response was happiness at survival and delight at the greater amounts of food to go around. As Zelkowicz noted in the Łódź Chronicle following giant actions in September 1942, ‘There is not the slightest doubt that this was a profound and terrible shock, and yet one must wonder at the indifference shown by those … from whom loved ones had been taken. It would seem that the events of recent days would have immersed the entire population of the ghetto in mourning for a long time to come and yet, right after the incidents, and even during the resettlement action, the populace was obsessed with everyday concerns—getting bread, rations, and so forth—and often went from immediate personal tragedy right back into daily life’.[57] Writing privately, he remarked that ‘nearly three years in the ghetto have schooled the people well. They have learned to feel so at home with death that death has become more obvious and more ordinary than life’.[58] Even Sierakowiak, admittedly grief-stricken at his mother’s deportation, was soon forced to return in his diary to his preoccupations of work, food, and reading. The anonymous boy from Łódź remarked that ‘It is the best indicator of our unbelievable psychological degradation that in the ghetto people are equally upset by the disappearance of a few bites of bread and by the death of their own father’. While this may have been an exaggeration, it certainly caught some of the truth.[59]   The extent to which communal feeling might collapse even beyond the context of food is demonstrated by the case of Jacob Gens, head of the Vilna Ghetto. When his Jewish police participated in the Nazis’ extermination of fellow Jews in October 1942, having bargained the number to be killed down, many responded with weary sympathy. As the Bundist Herman Kruk remarked, ‘The tragedy is that the … public mostly approves of Gens’s attitude. The public figures that perhaps this may really help’.[60] A sense of humiliation was therefore to be expected among many ghetto inhabitants. Again and again, the language of bestialisation arises in witnesses’ accounts. The anonymous girl in Łódź declared, ‘Our life is so tragic, so degraded. They treat us worse than pigs’.[61] Sierakowiak wrote, ‘We are not considered humans at all; cattle for work or slaughter’. The anonymous boy noted, ‘We are slaves devoid of free will, who are happy when trodden upon and beg only that ignore not be trodden to death’.[62] Even Rudashevski found pessimism hard to escape in holistic assessments of the ghetto: ‘Our life is a life of helpless terror. Our day has no future’.[63] All four, moreover, are presumed to have been eventually exterminated along with their relations. As even Robert Rozzet, an advocate of an enormously broad view of resistance, will admit, no optimistic account can hope to ‘overshadow our understanding of the heart of the Holocaust, which is comprised of terrible suffering, impossible dilemmas and death’.[64]   Spiritual resistance is therefore of limited utility in understanding life in the Nazi ghettos. In particular it underestimates the suffocating pressures which tended to break efforts at collective defiance, foster internal divisions, and irreparably colour all activities which are assumed to have constituted its practice. Within the broader context of the vast majority of inmates’ lives, it was at most an ephemeral phenomenon, subordinated to greater concerns. Indeed, perhaps most troubling of all is the concept’s tendency to ignore the physical pressures upon ghetto inhabitants. The march of starvation, disease, and fatigue disintegrated attempts at spiritual resistance, if they were even recognised as such by those who performed them. Whilst Warsaw’s Rabbi Nissenbaum may have declared that ‘[t]he enemy wants the soul but the Jews offer their bodies instead’, most found the two to be fatally interlinked.[65] Sierakowiak constantly noted his failing capacity to write and learn as his body degraded—on 29 April 1942, he wrote, ‘I don’t have any will, or rather any strength, for studying … Time is passing, my youth is passing, my school years, my power and enthusiasm are all passing’. Eight days later, he remarked, ‘we are in such a state of exhaustion that now I understand what it means not even to have enough strength to complain, let alone protest’.[66] Oneg Shabbat, meanwhile, records volunteer teachers despairing at the difficulty of teaching to the starved. As one put it, ‘How do you make an apathetic, hungry child, who is all the time thinking about a piece of bread, interested in something else?’[67] No dichotomy existed between ‘body’ and ‘soul’—as the former failed, so did the latter. If spiritual resistance can be salvaged, therefore, it must be placed within a context of physical suffering and applied sparingly, conceived more as an individual and often failed attempt   to preserve the self. It is typified by the introspective writers of the ghetto, rather than the collective, consciously defiant framework often used. What was needed in such an environment was not resistance but a brutal process of adjustment—the narrowing of compassion, the repression of the emotional damage wrought by the personal tragedies almost all underwent in the ghettos, and a doomed focus on survival. Trapped between such impulses, spiritual resistance was for most a tainted and fleeting experience. Nathaniel Rachman   Nathaniel Rachman is a recent History graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford. He will start an MPhil in American History at Christ’s College, Cambridge, this October, with a focus on the New Deal era. In In his spare time he is an amateur cat fancier. [1] Karel C Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair (Harvard University Press 2004) 69. [2] Or Rogovin, ‘Between Meir Dworzecki and Yehiel Dinur: amidah in the writing of Ka-Tzetnik 135633’ (2018) 24(2) Holocaust Studies 203, 203-05; Robert Rozett, ‘Jewish Resistance’ in Dan Stone (ed), The Historiography of the Holocaust  (Palgrave Macmillan 2004) 345. [3] Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2008) 2, 7. [4] ibid 11. [5] Nechama Tec, Resistance: Jews and Christians who Defied the Nazi Terror  (Oxford University Press 2013) 15. [6] Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination (HarperCollins 2008) 149. [7] Gilbert (n 3) 28. [8] ibid 12. [9] Dawid Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak (first published 1960; Kamil Turowski tr, Oxford University Press 1998) 174. [10] Lucjan Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941-1944  (Yale University Press 1984) 75. [11] Gustavo Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos  (Arnold 2003) 154. [12] Friedländer (n 6) 383. [13] ibid 151. [14] Gilbert (n 3) 21-3. [15] ibid 39. [16] Dobroszycki (n 10) 92. [17] Zoë Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2008) 11. [18] Dobroszycki (n 10) xxi. [19] Corni (n 11) 8. [20] Waxman (n 17) 9, 25. [21] Sierakowiak (n 9) 79; Corni (n 11) 174. [22] Corni (n 11) 182. [23] Sierakowiak (n 9) 218-6 [24] Alexandra Zapruder, Salvaged Pages  (Yale University Press 2002) 236. [25] ibid 375. [26] Friedländer (n 6) 528. [27] Jeffrey Shandler, Awakening Lives  (Yale University Press 2002) xxix-xxx. [28] Zapruder (n 24) 236. [29] Sierakowiak (n 9) 174. [30] Corni (n 11) 8. [31] Waxman (n 17) 16. [32] ibid 32. [33] Sierakowiak (n 9) 226. [34] Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (eds), Lodz Ghetto  (Viking 1989) 322-3. [35] Zapruder (n 24) 383. [36] Dobroszycki (n 10) xxix. [37] Zapruder (n 24) 217. [38] Sierakowiak (n 9) 107. [39] Dan Michman, ‘Jewish Leadership in Extremis’ in Stone (ed, n 2) 333. [40] Corni (n 11) 213. [41] ibid 215. [42] Sierakowiak (n 9) 9; Zapruder (n 24) 232. [43] Dobroszycki (n 10) 169; Corni (n 11) 218. [44] Sierakowiak (n 9) 81. [45] Zapruder (n 24) 206. [46] Corni (n 11) 211. [47] Adelson and Lapides (n 34) xiv. [48] Waxman (n 17) 2. [49] Sierakowiak (n 9) 164-5. [50] Friedländer (n 6) 395. [51] Waxman (n 17) 26. [52] Corni (n 11) 137. [53] Friedländer (n 6) 146. [54] Sierakowiak (n 9) 219. [55] Corni (n 11) 182. [56] Waxman (n 17) 46. [57] Dobroszycki (n 10) 255. [58] Adelson and Lapides (n 34) 325. [59] Zapruder (n 24) 376-7. [60] Friedländer (n 6) 436-7. [61] Zapruder (n 24) 241. [62] ibid 375. [63] ibid 198. [64] Rozett (n 2) 358. [65] Corni (n 11) 146. [66] Sierakowiak (n 9) 160-4. [67] Friedländer (n 6) 150.

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.

When writing critically about the Russian avant-garde, one finds oneself inexorably drawn towards cosmism, as inexorably as the Earth towards the Sun. Russian cosmism has nothing to do with the thematisation of cosmic feeling, unity with the cosmos, or other kinds of mystical experience as we know them in, for example, the esoteric, occultist Theosophy that made its way through Russia at around the same time. What concerned cosmists the most was, in fact, the natural universe, of stars and Sun and Earth. To them, nature was an enemy. Nature, after all, let men die. Some might even say it killed them.   Like the Marxists, the Russian cosmists practised philosophy not as an explanation of things as they are, but as a project of their transformation. Unlike the Marxists, they relied not on the ‘natural’ development of technology, but the envisioning of a new, radically different kind of technology. At this point, philosophy begins to move into the terrain of science fiction, a genre which has always concerned itself with man’s relationship with technology. This was also, as it happens, one of its entry points into the avant-garde movement. This piece will not be an exhaustive appraisal of their intersections, though it will touch on them where relevant. It will instead be an analysis of what Russian cosmism has to say about the human condition, about our relationship with space, and about our relationship with time.   Science fiction has traditionally also concerned itself with time, and with humanity’s relationship with its past and future. The Russian avant-garde was similarly occupied with these questions. The Russian artists who called their art Futurist, Suprematist, Constructivist, and later Productivist understood the present time as a point of transition from the past to the future, and so they tried to liberate themselves from the past as far as possible. They created their art not for the audience of the present, infested as they were by the bacteria of the past, but for the audience of the future. This audience, a humanity of a constructed future, was to be liberated from the oppressive energies of the past. But a liberatory ideal on this scale raises questions. Will mankind exist in the future at all? And if yes, how? There were no obvious answers. As Nietzsche had proclaimed, God was dead: the survival of mankind lost its ontological guarantee. The human race became subordinate to cosmic forces which cared not whether it lived or died.   The Russian cosmists understood the cosmic order as regulated by the force of gravity. However, gravity can also lead to a destruction of this order, a destruction of life. We might think, for example, of an asteroid drawn to Earth by the force of gravity, leaving devastation in its wake. If art and culture were made for the audience of the future, not the present, then one should take measures to guarantee the existence of this audience. However, to protect the Earth and its population means to liberate mankind from the ambivalent force of gravity. This is a necessary and urgent task—not least because gravity is a burden of the past, which the avant-garde despised— but an implausible one. A similar construction of social liberation was established in the mid-nineteenth century by Auguste Comte in his book System of Positive Polity: Treatise on Sociology Instituting the Religion of Humanity . At the beginning of the book, Comte   formulates the main principle of this new ‘religion of Humanity’: reason must be subjected to sentiment, to feeling.[1] Here Comte redefines and expands the main principle of his philosophy, which rejects everything spiritual and inaccessible to our feelings, not least reason. Comte understands feeling not only as an empirical experience, but as a principle unifying human society. Social feeling is what binds humanity together.   Comte was, however, keenly aware of the limitations of social feeling. He believed that the intensification of social feeling leads to communism, which destroys a human society that, as we know, is based not on feeling but on the power of gravity. Individual human existence depends on the social order, and the social order is subordinate to the cosmic order. Comte reminds us of the old laws of Newton: that we live under the same laws of gravity as the ever-active celestial bodies above us. Thus, it is gravity which orders our society. The communist revolution would be a revolution against gravity—and as such doomed to fail. Comte asserts that the ‘religion of humanity’ is the only true religion, as it is the only one whose object of veneration—humanity—undeniably exists. But if the reality of humanity in the present is a fact, its existence in the future is a matter of faith, of social myth. This social myth, or secular religion, is necessary for our species’ actions, because failing to believe in human perseverance would immobilise us. This faith relies not on the facts but solely on social feeling. Of course, gravity cannot prevent the cosmos from catastrophising humanity. The anticipation of such a possibility, Comte believes, makes the religion of humanity even more soberingly necessary. If we try to trace the source of this faith, however, we arrive once more at social feeling, which, without gravity, would become communism.   I bring up Comte because he was immensely influential, both in prerevolutionary Russia and Western academia (not least in sociology and positivism). He profoundly affected the thinking of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first People’s Commissar for Education (whose purview included art and culture too). Lunacharsky had explicitly elucidated the relationship between communism and gravity in two volumes written before the revolution.[2] He wrote of Comte’s ‘religion of Humanity’ that it was the highest form of religious thinking because it predicted some crucial elements of materialist thought, despite being avowedly anti-communist.[3] Lunacharsky writes later that the Newtonian model of gravitation is obsolete. Referring to Nietzsche as well as to ‘new achievements of physics’, Lunacharsky proposes that the cosmos is not ordered but chaotic, and that the cosmic space facilitates a polysemy of forces that oppose and fight each other. Humans are fighters in this grand cosmic architecture, a structure which rewards the most powerful force. In this respect, Lunacharsky professes his disbelief in the power of gravity as defining cosmic and social order. It is this disagreement about the relationship between cosmic order and social order that is central to the thinking of many intellectuals and artists before and after the Russian Revolution.   Similarly, Nikolay Fedorov, in an essay called ‘Astronomy and Architecture’ written at the end of the nineteenth century,[4] calls for changing the trajectory of the Earth through the universe. The Earth should cease to be a satellite of the Sun, and should instead be turned into a cosmic ship that would travel free from gravity through the Cosmic space. Fedorov writes about the Earth: ‘it will begin sailing the celestial seas, with the sum total of the human race rendered as captain, crew, and maintenance staff of this Earth Ship’. The energy for this free movement will come from the Sun.   Imagine now that the energy sent to the earth by the sun, which presently scatters off into space, could instead be conducted onto the earth, thanks to a massive configuration of lightning rod-aerostats, implements that will drive solar light to our planet. Imagine that this solar energy, once directed earthward, might alter the density of its new home, weaken the bonds of its gravity, giving rise in turn to the possibility of manipulating its celestial course through the heavens, rendering the Planet Earth, in effect, a great electric boat.   Fedorov, we discern, sees the victory over gravity as the imposition of a new cosmic order, where humans have emerged the strongest fighters and are free to subjugate their universe with mighty, inconceivable technologies. To create this new order humans must be liberated from nature, an ambivalent power that manifests itself in gravity, sexuality, and death. That is why Fedorov wanted to turn the Earth into a museum of mankind in which every human being was guaranteed immortality—an hauntological gallery of ghouls. At first glance, the structures of the ‘ship’ and the ‘museum’ might seem oppositional—one travels while the other is fixed. Here, though, we might recall Foucault’s notion of heterochronic space. According to Foucault, both museum and ship are heterochronic spaces where we can witness the accumulation of time, where ‘time never stops building up and topping its own summit’.[5]   As a result of this museumification (or heterochronification) of humanity, one reaches not only freedom from gravity but total power over death. The totality of this power provides a possibility—perhaps even an obligation—to resurrect our ancestors too. This signifies the collectivisation not only of space but also of time. In eternity, the conflicts between individuals and society will be eliminated where they could not be eliminated in time. The goal of immortality and resurrection is the highest goal for every individual. For this reason, the individual will always remain faithful to society if society makes this individual’s own immortality a given. Only in such a transtemporal society can one live without either spatial limitations imposed by private property or temporal limitations. However, the communist society of immortals must also be ‘interplanetary’—that is, it should occupy and control the entire space of the universe. This is the only way that the security of mankind can be guaranteed. The theological guarantee prefigures the technological guarantee. After all, technology so often looks like divine magic.   But who can make such a guarantee? Socialism promised social justice, but socialism also promised progress. The latter implies that only our genealogical successors would live in an advanced socialist society and enjoy social justice. The generations of the past and of the present, by contrast, are left to play the role of the passive victims of progress. There can be no justice for them. In this hypothesis, future generations can enjoy socialist justice only by cynically accepting an outrageous historical injustice: the exclusion of all previous generations from the realm of the future. Socialism thus exploits the dead in favour of the living, as well as exploiting those alive today in favour of those who will live later. The socialism of the future can only be just if it artificially resurrects all those who established the foundation for its success. The perfect socialism must be established not only in space but also in time.   We can understand progress as the substitution of old things for new ones. Can we find a technology that would not be subjected to this logic? Fedorov asserts that such a technology exists in preservation, as used in the gallery and the museum.[6] Fedorov is right that the very existence of the museum contradicts the utilitarian, pragmatic spirit of the nineteenth century. That is because the museum preserves with great care that which is useless or superfluous—things of the past that no longer have any practical utility. The museum does not accept death and decline of the object as they are accepted ‘in real life’. The museum is fundamentally at odds with progress, little more than a machine for making things last, for making them immortal. Because each human being is also a body among other bodies, a thing among other things, humans can also be blessed with the immortality of the museum. For Fedorov, immortality is not a paradise for human souls but a museum for living human bodies. Divine grace gives way to the museum curator, to the ambivalent technology of preservation.   From this, we see that technology as a whole must become the technology of art. Just as the museum administration is responsible not only for the general holdings of the museum’s collection but also for the physical integrity of every given work of art, making certain that the artworks are conserved when they threaten to decay, the state should bear responsibility for the resurrection and continued life of every individual person. The state can no longer let individuals die privately, or let the dead rest peacefully in their graves. The state must overcome the limits placed by death. Power over life and death must become total. This totality is achieved by equating art and politics, life and technology, state and museum, chronic and heterochronic. This overcoming of the boundaries between life and death leads not to the introduction of art into life, but to the very transfiguration of life into art. Human history becomes art history, after a fashion—every human being becomes a passive vessel of aesthetic beauty. Humans will understand themselves in terms not of biology but of the technology of art.   In their first manifesto, the representatives of the biocosmists—a political group from the sphere of Russian anarchism—wrote: ‘We take the essential and real right of man to be: the right to exist (immortality, resurrection, rejuvenation) and the freedom to move in cosmic space (and not the supposed rights announced when the bourgeois revolution was declared in 1789)’.[7] Aleksander Svyatogor, one of the leading biocosmist theoreticians, pointed out that the classical doctrine of anarchism requires a central power to ensure every individual’s immortality and freedom of movement in the cosmos. He thereby criticised the doctrine’s foundations. Svyatogor took immortality to be at once the goal and the prerequisite for a future communist society, since true social solidarity can only be cultivated among immortals. Death separates people, and private property cannot truly be eliminated if everybody owns a private share of time.[8]   The first proclamation of the new cosmic humanism was made by the radical Russian avant-garde even earlier, through the performance of the mystery-opera Victory over the Sun (1913).[9] The opera was written and staged with the participation of some of the most prominent members of the prerevolutionary Russian avant-garde movement: Kazimir Malevich, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, and Mikhail Matyshin. At once, we encounter the usual themes of the cosmists: capturing the Sun and liberating the Earth from gravity, establishing revolutionary anarchy instead of the traditional cosmic order. One can say there is no notion of immortality in Victory over the Sun . Nonetheless, the text of the opera begins with the words ‘everything is good that begins good and never ends’. Even if an individual is mortal, the reign of anarchy will never end. And men, at least the four strongmen who capture the Sun in the play, will never end, because they made the Sun their eternal prisoner. With this, we come some way to articulating a cosmist vision of humanism. Professor Boris Groys, adapted by Alex Charilaou   Professor Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist, and expert on Soviet-era art and literature, who specialises in the Russian avant-garde. He is a Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School. His work engages with traditions from French poststructuralism to modern Russian philosophy, but is situated at the juncture of aesthetics and politics. It is influenced by modern and postmodern philosophers and theoreticians including Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Walter Benjamin.   Alex Charilaou is a writer, artist, and second-year undergraduate in English and Drama at the University of Kent, interested in radical political theatre. Alex is an organiser with the Progressive International and has bylines in several publications, writing on the intersections between politics, economics, and theatre. [1] Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity: General View of Positivism and Introductory Principles  (John Henry Bridges tr, Longmans, Green and   Company 1875). [2] Anatoly Vasil’evich Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm: Tom 1  (Shipovnik 1908); Lunacharsky, Religiia i sotsializm: Tom 2  (Shipovnik 1911). [3] ibid. [4] Nikolai Fedorov, ‘Astronomy and Architecture’ (first published 1906; Ian Dreiblatt tr) in Boris Groys (ed), Russian Cosmism (e-flux and MIT Press 2018) 56f. [5] Michel Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’ (1984) 5 Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 46. [6] Nikolai Fedorov, ‘The Museum, 1st Meaning and Mission’ (first published 1906) in Arseny Zhilyaev (ed), Avant-Garde Museology (e-flux and Minnesota University Press 2015). [7] ‘Kreatorii Rossiiskikh i Moskovskikh Anarchistov-Biokosmistov, Deklarativnaia rezolyutsiia’ (1922) 1 Biokosmist 1. [8] Alexander Svyatogor, ‘The Doctrine of the Fathers and Anarchism-Biocosmism’ in Groys (n 4). [9] Various, Victory Over the Sun , vols 1 and 2 (first published 1913; Patricia Railing ed, Evgeny Steiner tr, Artists . Bookworks 2009).

The Jamaican Jerk seasoning. Halloween. Kendall Jenner’s new Tequila brand. The mascot of the Washington Redskins. Rugby. Victoria’s Secret Fashion Shows. Yoga. Mickey Rooney in  Breakfast at Tiffany’s . These things seem to have little in common apart from being perceived to be part of our Western culture. Yet, another feature unites them: they have all been subject to allegations of cultural appropriation.   This article explores the issue of cultural appropriation and the harm it can cause to indigenous communities in particular. It will explain how this problem exposes a gap in intellectual property law and set out the two main approaches to fill this gap. A comparative analysis of different jurisdictions’ attempts to resolve the issue will reveal the complexities of finding a satisfactory solution. The article will conclude with the argument that despite these difficulties a legal solution is desirable. Reliance on extra-judicial initiatives should no longer be the only way this area is regulated. Instead, legislative action by the world community is needed.   Cultural appropriation? Cultural borrowing? Cultural appreciation? Defining ‘cultural appropriation’   An effective legal framework requires a clear definition of the issue that it seeks to regulate. This is where the problem starts. It is difficult to draw a line between ‘cultural borrowing’ and ‘cultural appreciation’ on one hand and ‘cultural appropriation’ on the other.   Countless definitions of ‘cultural appropriation’ have been put forward by scholars, artists, and political activists. Defining the concept goes back to the fundamental questions of ‘What is art?’ and ‘How far can art go?’. Opinions as to the correct description are formed by individuals’ experiences and socio-economic environment as well as personal conceptions of art and culture. Resolving it would go far beyond the parameters of this article.   Therefore, the definition set out by Brigitte Vézina will be used henceforth: cultural appropriation is the taking by a member of a dominant culture of a cultural element from a minority culture without consent, attribution, or compensation.[1]   The harm caused by cultural appropriation   The harm cultural appropriation can cause is best understood when illustrated with an example. In 2012, Urban Outfitters launched a Navajo-branded clothing and accessories line.[2] Amongst other items, the line included so-called ‘Navajo panties’ as well as a liquor flask, all imprinted with patterns distinctive of the Navajo Nation, a tribe of Native Americans located across parts of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. Urban Outfitters had not sought permission for the use of the patterns or the name, nor had it attributed them to the culture from which they originated. The Navajo-branded flask was particularly controversial as alcohol was prohibited in the Navajo reservation. Urban Outfitters’ use was thus seen as making a mockery of the Nation’s cultural traditions. Similarly, the underwear was considered as an affront to the historical and spiritual origin of the patterns. The tribe filed a lawsuit against the fashion brand, claiming, amongst other things, compensation for what it described as ‘derogatory and scandalous’ use of the Navajo name and patterns.   The case of the ‘Navajo panties’ encapsulates the wider issue of cultural appropriation and how harmful it can be. As George Nicholas, Professor of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University, Canada, explains, indigenous peoples like the Navajo tribe have historically had little control over their heritage. As a result of colonialism and Western missionary work, many of these peoples were forced to leave behind their lands, languages, and religions, along with their cultural traditions and lifestyles.[3] The cultural heritage that still exists may be a community’s last remaining connection to its origin. Taking it without permission and putting it out of context disrespects the values that often underlie this heritage, which is often considered sacred or connected to ideas of morality and spirituality.   Western companies who commercialise indigenous culture without granting the communities a share of the profit generated by their involuntary contributions exacerbate the problem. This is particularly harmful for groups that live at the margins of society, struggling to fit into the modern Westernised world and routinely subject to overt and systemic discrimination and racism. Many indigenous societies share this bitter fate, whose severity was recognised by the UN in describing indigenous groups as one of the world’s most vulnerable groups of people.[4]   By denying those groups to benefit from their own cultural heritage, companies profit off the back of the most vulnerable. This further marginalises groups for whom the commercialisation of cultural heritage might be their only way to escape the dwindling spiral into poverty.   A gap in the law? Obstacles in intellectual property law   Whenever we find out about an injustice, our natural response is to look to the law to regulate it. Here, similarly, problems arise. Our current intellectual property law system, with its concepts of copyright, trademarks, and patents (amongst other mechanisms), offers protection to artists and inventors. Broadly speaking, it prevents use of creations and inventions without permission and offers compensation in the event of misuse. Each concept exhibits flaws and loopholes, as with most legal frameworks developed over time. Overall, however, the system succeeds in many cases to offer at least some form of protection to artists and creators who are operating in the Western commercialised world. On its face, one may think this to be an ideal system for solving the issue of ‘cultural appropriation’ and protecting indigenous culture. But a closer look reveals a sobering reality.   Intellectual property law is informed by a range of fundamental principles, on the basis of which it protects creations of the human mind. Almost all of them are based on Western ideas of creativity and ownership, and an underlying purpose of facilitating the commercialisation of creations. Three foundational concepts of intellectual property law illustrate this.   Originality   A key prerequisite of copyright protection is the requirement of originality. Across most jurisdictions, a musician needs to show that their piece of music is ‘original’; the same goes for an artist’s painting and a writer’s writing.[5] Definitions of ‘originality’ vary, but generally it requires authors to prove that their works are their own intellectual creation,[6] expressing their individual creativity,[7] and are not copied.[8]   It will be a rare case that indigenous peoples’ heritage is able to satisfy this requirement. Most cultural traditions have been passed down from generation to generation. Their purpose is to keep alive what was created centuries ago, to preserve rather than create; for the community, not for an individual.[9] Because of its very nature, indigenous culture will fall outside of what the law considers ‘original’ and thereby fail to qualify for protection offered by intellectual property law.   Ownership   A further key principle of intellectual property law is the concept of ownership, which entitles the holder of an intellectual property right to a number of actions and remedies. Generally, such rights are for the owner’s personal benefit, to reward their efforts put into the creation, to incentivise future innovation, and to protect their work from derogatory and unauthorised use.   Again, indigenous cultural heritage will rarely fit this framework. Indigenous groups are often organised around a clan or a wider community; this sits at odds with the idea that only individuals can own intellectual property rights and benefit from them.[10] So far, intellectual property law rejects the idea of communal ownership in any form that would enable groups such as the Navajo Nation to hold the benefit of intellectual property rights communally.[11]   Time limits   Finally, most intellectual property rights offer protection for a limited period of time only. For example, in the UK and the EU copyright for most types of work ceases 70 years after the death of the author.[12] This is so that the creation can become part of the ‘public domain’, wherein it may become freely available for artists to copy, alter, and commercially exploit, and hence facilitate future innovation and creation. A framework built around time limits is of little help to indigenous people who are seeking indefinite protection of their cultural heritage that is rooted in thousands of years of history.[13]   The above examples are but illustrations of the inherent inaptitude of the system of intellectual property law to regulate issues of cultural appropriation. Consequently, a different approach is needed.   Filling the gap: Amending what is, or creating a sui generis system?   Academic opinion is divided on the best way to address the concerns of indigenous people. Governments, too, have differed in attempts to offer at least some form of protection. Two approaches have emerged. One seeks to make space within the current intellectual property law system to accommodate for concerns of cultural heritage (I will refer to this as the ‘amendment approach’). Alternatively, proposals have been made to create a separate legal system from scratch that operates outside intellectual property law—a so-called ‘sui generis regime’.   Comparing attempts made by different jurisdictions to implement either of the two approaches shows the great difficulties of resolving the issue of appropriation of indigenous culture. A look at amendments of the existing system suggests that finding a solution within the existing IP framework is likely only ever to provide a makeshift solution—one that falls short of providing satisfactory protection to cultural heritage. Likewise, whilst promising attempts have been made to create a new system, such systems, too, are inevitably flawed because of the great complexity of the underlying issue. It is therefore unclear whether a large-scale, universal sui generis system could work.   The amendment approach: Australia and South Africa   The Australian Indigenous Communal Moral Rights Bill  (2003) opted for the amendment approach. Motivated by a number of cases involving cultural appropriation of Aboriginal art,[14] the Australian government aspired to alter the existing copyright system to accommodate the concerns of indigenous people. Although the Bill was never passed into law because of a change in government, the draft legislation is nevertheless an interesting illustration of the hurdles that legislators have to overcome when amending the existing system to regulate issues of cultural appropriation.   Amongst other changes, the Bill sought to overcome the individual ownership hurdle by incorporating community ownership. Groups of people would be allowed to hold ownership jointly to their cultural heritage. Despite this, the Bill’s introduction of community ownership received strong criticism. To overcome issues such as ownership, the Bill contained a series of requirements that indigenous communities needed to fulfil before their works of art, literature, or music could receive any protection. Copyright protection was thus not automatic, as opposed to the traditional copyright in Western systems, but tied to additional hurdles.[15] While this facilitated certainty and prevented an ‘overkill of rights’, which it was feared would lead to a decrease in value of individual rights, the requirements received strong criticism for being too onerous. In many cases, they rendered the new framework wholly impractical for indigenous communities to rely on.[16]   South Africa, too, took the amendment approach and over the years passed a number of legislative Acts seeking to make space for the concerns of indigenous communities.[17] Unlike the stringent requirements contained in the Australian Bill, South Africa incorporated wide-sweeping definitions and a system with low thresholds for copyright protection. On its face, this seemed like a welcome development, paving the way for the generous rights protection for which the communities had pleaded for decades.   Nevertheless, the amendments were strongly criticised by lawyers who were concerned that the imprecise definitions and generous requirements caused significant uncertainty.[18] It was argued that whilst such a system may restrict Western companies in their use of indigenous culture, its overly generous approach could end up working against the very people it sought to protect. Absent clear requirements that helped to establish which group was the rightful creator or community of origin of a relevant work, disputes amongst indigenous communities did not seem far off. This was a reason for concern particularly where the true place or group of origin is difficult to ascertain, as for example is the case for folklore passed down generations by word of mouth. A wide-sweeping copyright system that fuels tribal disputes can hardly be seen as a satisfactory answer to the century-old problem of cultural appropriation.   The Australian and South African attempts illustrate the difficulties of altering the existing system in a way that achieves sufficient protection without risking certainty, the value of individual rights and other undesirable side effects.   A sui generis approach: New Zealand   New Zealand attempted to create a new, sui generis system when it passed the Haka Ka Mate Attribution Act 2014.[19] The Act created a legal regime for the protection of the haka Ka Mate , a particular form of the traditional haka dance which is central to Maori culture. It gave the tribe of the Maori community who had invented this version of the dance a right to attribution. This means that (most) use of the dance requires prominent attribution of its origin. For example, filmmakers who wish to include this haka in their films are obliged to include a statement that identifies the chief and the tribe that invented it; failure to do so entitles the chief to an action of enforcement.[20]   The Act was welcomed by the legal and artist community and seen as a demonstration of how a sui generis regime is well-suited to tackle the issue of appropriation of indigenous culture.[21] However, as with the amendment approach, this solution is not without flaws. The new regime only concerns one specified Maori tribe and only for one particular part of its cultural heritage. It remains to be seen whether New Zealand’s pilot Act will be as effective when extended to indigenous communities at large.   Further, attribution alone does not protect against disrespectful use which continues to be unregulated. Although it may have this effect indirectly by deterring companies who wish to avoid public outcry after mocking indigenous culture while attributing it to its community of origin, this is highly speculative and less likely to apply to small companies with little media attention.   Finally, this form of a sui generis system anticipates a piecemeal approach by which only clearly identifiable works and sources of origin are applicable for protection. As mentioned earlier with reference to folklore, such clear identification is not always possible, and many cultural assets will not fit the frame.   The advantages of this solution are that it avoids confusion of the existing IP law system as well as any side-effects of removing the obstacles inherent in the current regime. And whilst the approach’s piecemeal fashion may appear unattractive at first, any aspiration to offer protection to all and any cultural heritage—even that which did not originate from one single, identifiable source—will inevitably risk an overly generous system, entailing similar problems like the South African amendments.   International community   The examples of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand show that states have recognised the need for protection of indigenous culture. Despite such efforts, however, national legislatures continue to struggle to find satisfactory solutions.   In light of this, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), an agency of the UN and the global forum for intellectual property policy, has long recognised the need for an international solution. Discussions by the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) about an appropriate framework first started 40 years ago.[22] Despite many years in deliberation, the Committee is yet to put forward its solution.   From the IGC’s discussions, which led to the Draft Articles on the Protection of Traditional Cultural Expressions, one can infer that the Committee is pursuing a solution within the existing IP framework—the amendment approach. Commentators have suggested that it is unlikely that the Committee will introduce a sui generis regime. Brigitte Vézina argues that this is because a new system would dramatically change the way the Western world is able to interact with indigenous cultural heritage. A sui generis regime that offers strong protection could curtail many common practices across various different sectors of the economy and in society as a whole.[23]   This is an important point. We, as Western society, have become accustomed to borrowing and taking inspiration from other cultures—zombie Halloween costumes, yoga, and the Jamaican Jerk seasoning are but a few examples. An entirely new regime comes with the risk of compromising cultural exchange for the sake of protection. The question is whether we are ready to recognise the harm that this cultural exchange can do to indigenous societies and how far we are willing to let that risk curtail our freedoms in order to protect their heritage.   For now: Education and consumer responsibility   Whilst the law has been struggling to deal with the issue, others have taken action. An example of an initiative seeking to put control over cultural heritage back into the hands of indigenous people is Local Contexts, an organisation which offers customisable labels that can be attached to cultural heritage.[24] The labels allow each community to express specific conditions and guidance for using their cultural traditions. Local Contexts is currently in the early stages of developing an extra-legal licensing concept that will enable communities to commercialise their cultural heritage where intellectual property law fails to do so. The fact that a non-governmental organisation is developing what international legislative bodies have so far failed to accomplish is further testament to how far the law is lagging behind.   The IPinCH research project educates those involved in the intellectual property system about the issue of appropriation of indigenous culture.[25] A wide range of resources and information factsheets are available with information for creators, artists, and companies on the issue and advice on how to think about it. George Nicholas, who is also leader of the IPinCH project, suggests that such education efforts and as well as consumer responsibility are the best ways to tackle the issue of cultural appropriation. He pleads for a change in consumer behaviour with greater awareness of cultural origin, similar to the recent shift towards locally grown foods and sustainably produced products.[26]   It is certainly true that education and greater consumer awareness are key to tackling cultural appropriation. However, this is no excuse for national and international legislative bodies to abandon efforts to provide a legal solution. If anything, initiatives like Local Contexts and IPinCH emphasise the need for the law to finally catch up, either by amending the existing system in a satisfactory manner or by introducing a new system. They should be treated as starting signals of what needs to be a wide-sweeping reform of the international intellectual property law regime.   Conclusion   As this article has shown, cultural appropriation is a phenomenon that reveals a gap in the law, one that legislators around the world have so far struggled to close. It may be one of the most complex problems the intellectual property system has to grapple with. Resolution is urgently needed, especially in light of ever-increasing intercultural exchange fuelled by globalisation and social media.   The Navajo Nation was lucky. 15 years after Urban Outfitters first launched its ‘Navajo line’ the two parties settled and entered into an agreement for future collaboration.[27] But indigenous communities should not have to engage in decades of legal fighting to establish whether they have any claims to what is their very own cultural heritage—a fight that only few communities are able to engage in, with others being left uninformed about their rights and options of enforcement. It remains to be seen at what point the international community will finally step up and provide satisfactory legal protection. One can only hope that it is sooner rather than later. Mirjam Dietrich   Mirjam Dietrich is a third-year undergraduate in Law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Her interests lie in intellectual property law and its potential for development and growth. Throughout her studies she was involved in pro bono projects, successfully advising startups in developing countries on IP matters and other legal issues. [1] Brigitte Vézina, ‘Curbing Cultural Appropriation in the Fashion Industry’ CIGI Paper 213 (April 2019). [2] ‘Navajo Nation sues Urban Outfitters for trademark infringement’ Guardian  (London, 1 March 2012) < https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/01/navajo-nation-sues-urban-outfitters > accessed 20 February 2021. [3] George Nicholas, ‘Confronting the Specter of Cultural Appropriation’ ( SAPIENS Anthropology Magazine , 5 October 2018) < https://www.sapiens.org/culture/cultural-appropriation-halloween/ > accessed 20 February 2021. [4] ‘Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations’ ( United Nations ) < www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/about-us.html > accessed 20 February 2021. [5] eg Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (UK) s 1(1). [6] Case C-5/08 Infopaq International A/S v Danske Dagblades Forening  [2009] ECR I-6569, para 37. [7] ibid, paras 45-46. [8]  University of London Press v University Tutorial Press  [1916] 2 Ch 601, 608-609. [9] Brigitte Vézina, ‘Ensuring Respect for Indigenous Cultures: A Moral Rights Approach’ CIGI Paper 243 (March 2020) 11. [10] RL Gana, ‘Has Creativity Died in the Third World? Some Implications of the Internationalization of Intellectual Property’ (1995-96) 24(1) Denver Journal of International Law & Policy 109, 132. [11] Vézina (n 9) 12; Yumbulul v Reserve Bank of Australia  (1991) 21 IPR 481. [12] See Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (UK) ss 12-15A, and Directive 2006/116/EC. [13] RL Okediji, ‘Traditional Knowledge and the Public Domain’ CIGI Paper 176 (15 June 2018). [14] See Yumbulul v Reserve Bank of Australia (1991) 21 IPR 481; Bulun Bulun v R&T Textiles  (1998) 41 IPR 5; Milpurrurru v Indofurn Pty Ltd  (1995) 30   IPR 209. [15] Patricia Adjei, ‘IP Australia and Traditional knowledge consultation process’ < www.ipaustralia.gov.au/sites/g/files/net856/f/ submission_-_patricia_adjei.pdf > accessed 20 February 2021. [16] Samantha Joseph and Erin Mackay, ‘Moral Rights and Indigenous Communities’ Arts and Law Centre Australia  (30 September 2006). [17] See Intellectual Property Laws Amendments Act 28 of 2013 (SA). [18] Wim Alberts and Rachel Sikwane, ‘South Africa: Intellectual Property Laws Amendments Bill for Indigenous Rights’ ( Mondaq , 21 November 2011) < https://www.mondaq.com/southafrica/trademark/154240/intellectual-property-laws-amendment-bill-for-indigenous-rights > accessed 20 February 2021. [19] Haka Ka Mate Attribution Act 2014 (NZ), 2014 No 18. [20] New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment, Haka Ka Mate Attribution Act 2014 Guidelines  (NZ) 2014 [21] Earl Gray, ‘How Indigenous Rights and Intellectual Property Can Work Together’ INTA Bulletin  (15 April 2019) < https://www.inta.org/perspectives/features/how-indigenous-rights-and-intellectual-property-can-work-together/ > accessed 20 February 2021. [22] UNESCO & WIPO, Model Provisions for National Laws on the Protection of Expressions of Folklore Against Illicit Exploitation and Other Prejudicial Action (1982). [23] Vézina (n 9) 20. [24] See < https://localcontexts.org >. [25] See < http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch >. [26] Nicholas (n 3). [27] Nicky Woolf, ‘Urban Outfitters settles with Navajo Nation after illegally using tribe’s name’ Guardian  (London, 19 November 2016) < https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/18/urban-outfitters-navajo-nation-settlement > accessed 20 February 2021.

It didn’t take long for the backlash against last summer’s enthralling ESPN Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance  to arrive. Before it was even over, Scottie Pippen—Jordan’s ever-present wingman and a superb player in his own right—was apparently ‘livid’ to be described as ‘selfish’ by his former teammate. Another teammate, Horace Grant, part of the Chicago Bulls team that won the first three-peat (three-in-a-row) NBA championships, described the series, in part produced by Jordan’s media company, as a ‘lie, lie, lie’, and a number of former players and journalists later joined the chorus. Jordan didn’t exclude Isiah Thomas from the 1992 Olympic ‘Dream Team’: lie. Jordan was poisoned by a pizza during the 1997 finals in Utah: lie. The Bulls would have stayed together for another year to try to win a seventh championship: lie.   The series ran during last year’s coronavirus-postponed NBA finals, in which current star Lebron James shone. It was Jordan’s way of weighing in on the ongoing GOAT debate: who is the Greatest Of All Time. As it stands, thanks to his six championship wins, Jordan is still number one (versus four for James), and the documentary underlined his ultra-competitive nature. But it may have backfired too, with a number of players coming out to say they didn’t like him, and numerous commentators starting to wonder whether the more team-oriented and socially conscious James was in fact a better role model than the highly individualist and capitalist Jordan. Jordan once famously declared that ‘Republicans wear sneakers too’—although more recently he did come out strongly in favour of the George Floyd protests.   In the documentary itself many of his former teammates described Jordan as a ‘jerk’ or an ‘asshole’, and the series didn’t shy away from Jordan’s confrontational and bullying leadership style, especially towards team manager Jerry Krause. With everyone rounding on Jordan, however, one might wonder whether this was a case of sour grapes, or indeed of ressentiment  towards one the of the most successful sports stars of all time. A reader of Nietzsche would have asked if it was an example of herd morality .   In his classic On the Genealogy of Morality , Nietzsche divided the world into two moralities: ‘master morality’, which values strength, beauty, courage, and success; and ‘slave’ or ‘herd’ morality, which values kindness, empathy, and sympathy. The former he associated with the ancient Homeric Greeks, the latter with early Christianity: indeed, his whole point was that there had been a ‘slave revolt’ in morality during the Roman Empire that led to ‘slave’, rather than ‘master’, morality being celebrated.   So is Jordan an example of master morality, selfishly driving those around him so that he can succeed, against which others are now revolting by saying he was mean, only interested in himself and his own success? Is he even an example of the enigmatic Übermensch , the superman Nietzsche announced in his philosophical-poetic masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra ? Is ‘Air Jordan’ the ‘dancing star’ who will literally jump over modern man and the morality of the day ( ü̈ber  is German for ‘over’)? Is the ‘Black Jesus’, as Jordan once called himself, the Antichrist Nietzsche called upon in his last book before going mad? The analogy is worth pursuing, not least because basketball, which is played so high in the sky, lends itself particularly well to Nietzsche’s metaphors. (If the epithet of the ‘beautiful game’ is already taken, then perhaps basketball can be the most elegant.)   Jordan is in one sense clearly not the Übermensch . We learn of the continuous personal slights and grudges (a form of ressentiment ) he held against players to fuel his game. But in another he is, at least in terms of the game itself. He is described in the last episode of the series as being essentially ‘present’, as not letting the failures of the past get in the way of future success. In this he seems to have achieved what Nietzsche was getting at with his idea of the ‘eternal return’: the challenge of living in the moment by accepting to relive every instant of your life an infinite number of times, exactly as it was, so as to free yourself from past regrets. Nietzsche describes Napoleon as a mixture of Übermensch  and Unmensch (brute)—a sort of ‘beauty and the beast’—and perhaps that’s the right figure to compare Jordan with.   The most poignant moment of the series came at the end of episode seven (out of ten). An emotional Jordan explained why he was so tyrannical with his teammates (he once punched his smaller teammate Steve Kerr in the face during practice), cutting off the sequence with a ‘break’. That this sequence came 45 minutes into his first filmed interview shows how much Jordan has been keeping in for such a long time. In fact, Jordan seems to have internalised much during his playing career, not least the murder of his father, building a protective carapace around himself from which emotion would only spill out uncontrollably upon the achievement of success. Witness the unforgettable scene of him crying on the floor of the changing rooms on Father’s Day 1996 having won his fourth championship. Since retiring, Jordan has become infamous for crying at public events, so much so it has become a meme. But here Jordan is being true (truthfulness is a characteristic of master morality): true to himself, true to who he was and how he had to be to win.   Thus Spoke Zarathustra  is composed of four parts, but the last part Nietzsche kept to himself, only distributing certain copies amongst his friends. One can read it as a warning about the pitfalls ‘higher men’ may fall into on their path towards the Übermensch . Jordan is aware of the things he had to do to himself in order to succeed, things he has to live with for the rest of his life. That drive, as the closing scene of The Last Dance  portrays, leaves him alone, smoking his cigar on a bench looking out at the sea. Only he can tell if he’s happy.   Basketball is my sport. I grew up watching recorded tapes of the nineties finals: that Jordan should make it all the way to Dublin, hardly a hotbed of budding ballers, is itself testament to his reach. The apex for me came in captaining the Cambridge Blues Basketball team. We lost to Oxford—I will never know that feeling of being on top of the world—and the only thing worth remembering from that game is a phrase uttered by an onlooking professor who knew my affection for Nietzsche: ‘Thus Dunks Zarathustra’.   Jordan needs no defenders. Not everyone can—or indeed wants to—‘be like Mike’. But that someone like Michael Jordan should be able to exist, if not be celebrated, in today’s world still seems of the utmost importance. Hugo Drochon   Hugo Drochon is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham and the author of Nietzsche’s Great Politics  (Princeton University Press 2016). He received his PhD from Cambridge in 2012 and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’ project at CRASSH, Cambridge, from 2013-18 before going to Nottingham. He works on Nietzsche’s politics, democratic theory, liberalism, conspiracy theories, and the far-right; he writes for the Guardian , New Statesman , and TLS ; and he managed to beat Oxford as a basketball coach in 2014.

Maggi Hambling CBE is a painter and sculptor. Subjects for many of her paintings are the sea and the dead. Her sculptures are famous and controversial: they include  A Conversation with Oscar Wilde and  A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft . She has been awarded the Jerwood Painting Prize and the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.   CJLPA : There is a humanity in your work which is uncompromising, with no sentimentality, which seems to rise from the depth of things, whether your work depicts a laughing face, the storm at sea, or a dying man. You say you need to empty yourself of your baggage in order for the subject matter to come through you onto the canvas or into the sculpture. How difficult is it for you to achieve that state? How do you do it?   Maggi Hambling : I live in constant doubt. When something better happens in my work I cannot account for how or why, the source is always mysterious. The muse is fickle and it is always after desperation that I find courage.   CJLPA : Life, death, and love seem to be at the very core of your work, arrived at through a creative process where intuition plays a major role. One of your paintings, which has the word ‘certain’ written at the bottom, has started as an attempt to paint something like the morning dew, and then you turned it upside down, only to see the face of your father emerge from the sea of brushstrokes. Can you elaborate on this process and the issue of certainty/uncertainty?   MH : The whole business is uncertain, as every drawing, painting, or sculpture must be an experiment… If not, there is only mannerism, which is the death of art.   CJLPA : In your more recent work, you seem to be preoccupied with the fragility of humankind, wars, refugees dying at sea, the melting of the ice caps, and the mindless cruelty we inflict on animals. Are these things which make you angry? Can you comment on this?   MH : Yes, I feel anger and despair, but mostly at myself.   CJLPA : One of your sculptures—which started out as a found object, and then you made into the head of a pig, hollow on the inside—is meant to be the head of a politician. As an artist, is there a piece of advice you would give to future politicians?   MH : Listen, without an agenda, and remember that actions speak louder than words.   CJLPA : If you were to choose one thing to change in society or law, what would it be?   MH : Intolerance.   Fig 1. 2016 (Maggi Hambling 2016, oil on canvas, 84 x 72in). Fig 2. Aleppo IV (Maggi Hambling 2016–17, oil on canvas, 67 x 54in). Fig 3. Rhino without horn (Maggi Hambling 2019, oil on canvas, 48 x 36in). Fig 4. Victim II (Maggi Hambling 2013, oil on canvas, 12 x 17in). Alexander (Sami) Kardos-Nyheim, the interviewer, is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of CJLPA .