‘Crystal World’ was an art exhibition held in July-October 2011. Curated by Gill Perry, Professor of Art History at the Open University and with the collaboration of the Royal Society, it explored modern artists’ fascination with the crystals and the relationships with scientific and philosophical studies of these chemical substances. In this podcast Gill Perry discusses the exhibition with Dr Keith Moore, Chief Librarian of the Royal Society. The interview takes place in the exhibition space in October, 2011.

Sophie Howarth, Paul Wood, Matthew Gale, Dominic Willsdon, Discussion 1

Dominic Willsdon, To the Things Themselves! Phenomenology and Minimal Art  Phenomenology is a school of thought founded by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others developed and expanded phenomenology to address art, literature, society and politics.

Sophie Howarth, Phyllida Barlow, Paul Wood, Mark Godfrey, Jonathan Jones, Jason Gaiger and Jane Burton, Discussion 2  From Russian Suprematism through Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and beyond, abstraction has been variously interpreted as nihilistic, political, sublime, decorative and ironic. While much writing about abstract art has been opaque, the talks here aim to clearly open up a variety of theoretical models for discussion.

Jason Gaiger, Barnett Newman and the Evocation of the Sublime  Speaker: Jason Gaiger, Lecturer in Art History at The Open University.In an important essay, 'The Sublime is Now', written in 1948, Barnett Newman rejected the search for beauty in favour of 'man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relation to the absolute emotions'.

Steve Edwards, Nigel Warburton, Marko Daniel, Kathe Kollwitz, Frida Kahlo and Frances Morris, Plenary Discussion  At this study day leading curators and art historians discuss the relationship between exhibitions, museum collections and art history

Marko Daniel and Frances Morris, Tate Modern - A Case Study  This paper reviews the controversial opening display of the permanent collection at Tate Modern which embraced a thematic, as opposed to chronological structure, as well as the principle of rotating displays. It discusses the recent rehang of the collection which departs from the opening display in significant ways while it also continues to address the same challenges and builds on and develops a number of its principles.

Nigel Warburton, Juxtapositions  Art galleries select and display material objects, typically unique works, in specific locations. Viewers experience these, consciously absorbing curators' interpretations from descriptions and captions, often forearmed with preconceptions about what they are seeing. Particular juxtapositions affect the viewer in a range of ways many of them semi- or pre-conscious. Philosopher Nigel Warburton considers some of the issues raised by juxtaposition using examples from the recent Tate Modern re-hang.

Jason Gaiger, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, Incidental and Integral Beauty: Duchamp, Danto and the Intractable Avant-Garde  It is widely accepted that the radical avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century abjured beauty, thereby effecting a decisive break with the art of the past. Duchamp is accorded a leading role in this process insofar as he rejected the satisfactions of ‘retinal pleasure’ in favour of an art of ideas.

Karen Knorr, FABLES: Towards a Digital Imaginary  Karen Knorr speaks about her recent work FABLES which continues her investigation into high art culture and its museum context using live and dead animals photographed in museums and heritage sites across France. FABLES, a survey show of Knorr's work will be exhibited at Centrale Electrique, European Centre for Contemporary Art until September 28 2008. Suggested Further Reading A Matter of Life and Death (1946) Film by Powell and Pressburger The Birds (1963) Alfred Hitchcock A Thousand Plateaux (1980) Deleuze and Guattari