Monocle on Culture
Robert Bound and guests explore what’s new in art, film, books, and media. Expect lively discussions, in-depth interviews, and expert insights.
Latest Episodes
How do you reboot a classic?
Great works and well-loved products are always being rewritten, redesigned, remixed or remade. But how do you do this successfully? How subtle or brash should you be about reworking something the public are so…
Whatever happened to fanzines?
Will Hodgkinson from ‘The Times’ and British Undergound’s Crispin Parry talk about the romance of waxing lyrical about your favourite bands in a homemade mag and whether fanzines can only exist in print. Plus…
Is acoustic on its way out?
To answer this week’s question on Culture, we discover the ‘yaybahar’ – a new acoustic instrument from Istanbul that sounds electronic – we speak to oboe makers Howarth of London, piano-making masters Steinway &…
How do you write a column?
We ask columnists Simon Kuper, Tim Dowling and Tabatha Southey how they approach the tricky art of column writing. How do you choose your subject? How do you keep it amusing? And how do…
Top draw
Rob Bound analyses the results of ‘The Art Newspaper’ exhibition and its museum-attendance survey for 2014 to find out which institutions come out on top around the world. Is it the masters or the…
What gets washed up?
Culture is trawling the shores of Britain, Brazil and beyond this week to ask ‘What gets washed up?’ We examine ancient objects that tell tales of London’s past and track the authors of messages…
How do you write about fashion?
This week Rob Bound asks writer Charlie Porter, chief fashion critic at the ‘New York Times’ Vanessa Friedman and online style guru Nick Wooster how to write about fashion.
Play it again
We go crate-digging with ‘Times’ rock and pop critic Will Hodgkinson, and Matt Sullivan, co-founder of record label Light in the Attic, who tell us how you find a lost record and then get…
Font of knowledge
This week we ask, ‘how do you talk about design?’ Answering are ‘Helvetica’ director Gary Hustwit, the writer and Design Museum founder Stephen Bayley and Moma’s director of merchandising. Contains: typefaces, cars, singing shop…
Is everyone a curator?
We look into the use – and misuse – of that much-thrown around word “curator”; can a shop window be curated like a fine-art gallery can be? We speak to art experts, writers and…
