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The Arts Hour

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

The best global arts coverage from across the BBC.

The Arts Hour: Director John Waters

John Waters and Grayson Perry

09/11/2013

Director John Waters

BBC World Service - The Arts Hour, Director John Waters

'They aren’t funny, they’re Just Gross' - Director John Waters on Hollywood comedies

'They aren’t funny, they’re Just Gross' - Director John Waters on Hollywood gross-out comedies.

Director John Waters, veteran film-maker behind kitch titles like Hairspray and Pink Flamingos discusses Catholicism, making sexploitation movies for art theatres and hitch-hiking across America.

We travel to Sweden to uncover why the country’s songwriters seemingly own the UK and US pop charts – they are behind the biggest hits of Britney, Bieber, Clarkson and Gaga.

Plus, we take a look at art and music created from mosquito wings.

And, in the last of his four Reith Lectures, recorded in front of an audience at Central St Martins School of Art in London, Grayson Perry discusses his life in the art world - the journey from the unconscious child playing with paint, to the award-winning artist of today. Perry looks back and asks why men and women throughout history, despite the many privations they suffered, always made art. And he discusses the central purpose of creating art - to heal psychological wounds and to make meaning.

Photos: John Waters, Grayson Perry(BBC Publicity)

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