Speaker: Professor Alex Sharpe, University of Warwick

This audio-visual lecture considers the relationship between the aesthetic evaluation of art and ethics. To do so, it draws on Bowie’s 1976 Isolar World tour, through which, as the Thin White Duke, Bowie performed his brilliant Station to Station album. Through this artwork (the performance, the music, the stagecraft), Bowie conjured up Nuremberg. He did so in order to explore in a more intense way a theme that had long interested him, the relationship between leader (star) and followers (audience), especially those moments when the latter give themselves over to the former, to power. This Bowie provides our focus for two reasons. First, during his Thin White Duke period, Rock Against Racism accused Bowie of flirting with fascism, and second, the music he produced, its artistic presentation and the sublime affect it had on his audience, make this period of Bowie’s creative output stand out as exceptional. In other words, some of Bowie’s greatest work drew on national socialism, or at least, its theatricality and other artistic props. That is, Bowie adopted a fascist icon character and built his 1976 world tour, at least in part, around national socialist stagecraft, the implications of which the lecture will explore.

This is an in-person event. It will be followed by a Q&A and drinks reception.