New Generation Thinkers: The Paradox of Ecological Art

Sculptures like mouldy fruit, sea creatures that look like oil, blocks of ice carved from a melting glacier and transported to a gallery, reforesting a disused quarry: Vid Simoniti looks at different examples of environmental art and asks whether they create empathy with nature and inspire behaviour change or do we really need pictures of loft insulation and ground source heat pumps displayed on gallery walls?

Vid Simoniti lectures at the University of Liverpool. He hosted a series of podcasts Art Against the World for the Liverpool Biennial 2021. He was selected as a New Generation Thinker in 2021 on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which turns research into radio. You can hear him taking part in this Free Thinking discussion about Who Needs Critics? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w5f3

Producer: Luke Mulhall