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.

Speaker: Professor Alex Sharpe, University of Warwick

This lecture will consider the biggest of themes, death. More particularly, it will consider three ways of ‘being with death’ that are apparent in the life and work of the late David Bowie (religious transcendence, existential defiance, and acceptance). It draws, in particular, on the philosophy of Simon Critchley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Tibetan Buddhism to explore these themes in Bowie’s work. Starting from Critchley’s premise that we should face down death, neither succumbing to escapism (oblivion) nor to the temptations of an afterlife (redemption), it argues, following Nietzsche, that we must, in order to avoid nihilism, make meaning in the world, and following Heidegger, that we must do so with others.

Freedom is understood as only taking shape once the inevitability of death is faced, and ideally when we live our life in readiness for it with others. David Bowie’s work can be viewed as a meditation on death. Importantly, he helped shape a meaningful experience of death, including his own, through a lifelong and open dialogue with fans about questions of alienation, anxiety, fear and mortality.

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

Please register to attend!