Alain De Botton
speaker
1,037 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Alain De Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We don't need to use that word soul, but it's a very interesting word.
Yeah.
Again, slightly strangely, no.
I'm not interested in looking backwards or sideways to religious eras.
I'm doing something slightly unusual, which is to say, to really advocate for creativity.
creativity in the areas in which religions used to operate.
I'm not interested in reviving religions or fostering new forms of religiosity, but rather in exploring what religions were up to and thinking about what some of the gaps, you might say, are.
I mean, many of the museums of Europe, take the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, were explicitly modeled in the late 19th century on churches.
there was a very common belief that culture would replace scripture, that in the absence of divine beliefs, what would pick up the slack, what would direct emotion, what would provide points of communion, et cetera, would be the arts.
And that's why, as I say, so many
civic, cultural buildings look like churches or temples, places of worship.
The very direct kind of reference.
And so one might say, well, isn't that fair enough?
And I draw attention really to the way in which that seems a slightly incomplete project.
So I'm speaking to you from London.
If you showed up at the Tate Gallery and went to the Rothko room and knelt down in front of a Rothko and burst into tears and
were profoundly moved in a way that we're not really used to in the age of museums and according to the codes of how to behave in a museum.
You'd be quickly ushered out by the guards.
You're supposed to imbibe art in ways that are, you know, one might say chilly, even cold.
It's a private experience.
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