The Essay: New Generation Thinkers

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The Essay: New Generation Thinkers: Hoarding or Collecting?

Hoarding or Collecting?

New Generation Thinkers

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Diarmuid Hester sorts through stuff saved by Francis Bacon, Vivian Maier and his own dad.

What's the difference between collecting football programmes and objects that lead to art? Diarmuid Hester muses on the thin line between inspiration and a compulsive disorder.

Vivian Maier left over 150,000 negatives when she died in 2009. Her boxes and boxes of unprinted street photographs were stacked alongside shoulder-high piles of newspapers in her Chicago home.  The artist Francis Bacon's studio has been painstakingly recreated in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin complete with paint-spattered furniture and over 7,000 items. New Generation Thinker Diarmuid Hester's research looks at ideas about waste and in this Essay he considers what the difference might be between hoarding and collecting and between the stuff assembled by these artists and his own father's shelves of matchday programmes. 

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Dr Diarmuid Hester is radical cultural historian of the United States after 1950, and he teaches on sexually dissident literature, art, film, and performance at the University of Cambridge.  He has published a critical biography of Dennis Cooper called Wrong and you can find his Essay for Radio 3 about Cooper in the series Books to Make Space For on the Bookshelf and his postcard about Derek Jarman's garden in the Free Thinking archives.  New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who turn their research into radio.

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Ten academics make and present radio programmes for Radio 3 based on their research.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Council to select ten academics each year to make radio programmes based on their research.

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