It’s impossible to remove humanity from culture; it is the context into which we are born and live our lives. In his 1658 painting Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, Nicholas Poussin depicts the blind giant Orion being directed towards the healing rays of the sun by his servant Cedalion, who stood on his shoulders acting as his eyes. This metaphor explains well how culture comes to us. The generation of the living Cedalion is able to see further, by standing on the back of those who have gone before us – Orion. We inherit their now as our history, and build on it.

Culture is not a thing – it is everything. Every selfie, every tweet, every TikTok, every painting, every sculpture, song, novel, article, blog post, video. Everything we do as a society has a deliberateness, an aesthetic that goes beyond the function and allows that act to have a place in time and a purpose that we imbue. Our cultural artefacts are the components of telling the story of who we are.

John Berger, in his 1972 book Ways of Seeing, summed this up unsurprisingly beautifully: ‘It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words … but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.’ Being able to identify a ‘thing’ and understand the meaning of that same thing are also different and change over time. In the Middle Ages, for example, there was a belief in the physicality of hell that meant that fire became a real-world manifestation of that belief as an all-consuming, burning and painful phenomena – conversely, the concept of hell would also have carried significantly less significance had it not been for that physical embodiment. To put it another way, it was not enough to simply hold a sign up that says hell is bad. For us to get it, we needed the visual, the metaphor, such that we could temporarily accommodate the experience of hell into our being to make sense of it.

Growing up, my family used to visit India every year. Not just to see relatives, but usually to travel, often to far-flung remote parts of India where, as a child, I was thrust into a world very different from my suburban home in Manchester. Indian life is steeped in art and metaphor; things are not merely said with words, they are told with stories, pictures, dance, food and every tool at the creative disposal of the population. The intensity is deafening, like the surface of a stormy sea, until you are immersed into it, underwater, at which point everything makes perfect sense. It is perhaps because I experienced that profound cultural immersion at an early age that I spend a lot of my life seeking it out, whether that’s through my own creative outlets (photography and poetry) or through consuming as much culture as I possibly can.

We are a storytelling species, and our shared stories are integral to our evolving collective identity. In this chapter are my conversations with some amazing novelists, including the great Maya Angelou, Elif Shafak and Yann Martel, who spoke to me about those stories that shape us. Of course, stories are told across so many forms, and to understand I have also included here some of my interviews with poets, including Lemn Sissay, George the Poet and Sir Andrew Motion; artist Tracey Emin; chef Heston Blumenthal; musicians including Black Thought, Moby, Lang Lang and Hans Zimmer; filmmakers Ken Loach and Paul Greengrass; as well as two of the most iconic photographers of the last century, David Bailey and Rankin. Their answers were fascinating to me, and paint a vivid picture of the most complex phenomena of humanity: our culture.

What is the role of storytelling in human culture?

Ed Catmull: Storytelling is our fundamental way of communicating with each other and informing each other. If we start from the beginning, one of the most rewarding things for the child and the adult is having the child on your lap while you tell them stories or read to them from a book. You are not only telling a story, but forging an emotional bond in doing that. Then, as a child, you go to school and receive another form of storytelling, where you’re told the stories of our past, our history and our culture; what happened with our presidents, kings, revolutions and heroes. Whatever those stories are, they are always simplifications of what happened. We can never live through the events of the past – the only things we have left are the stories. The art form of storytelling is trying to figure out how you capture the essence, to inform someone about what’s important in what happened, but they can never live it themselves.

Why do we write?

Maya Angelou: We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans: because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are. Not just how tall we are, or thin, but who we are internally, perhaps even spiritually. There’s something which impels us to show our inner souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know. When a poet writes a line that immediately translates from a black person to a white person, from an old person to young, or when a rich person writes a line that a poor person can comprehend, that’s a success.

George the Poet: There’s something magical in these sounds we call words. Words are loaded with meaning which is unique to the human experience. In all our hundreds of thousands of years of experience, we still don’t know what a dog’s bark means. Those sounds don’t carry a specific relevance with us. We’ve been handed down language from generation to generation, and within it is coded so much human experience that when those sounds are organized deliberately with emotive effect? It’s the closest thing we have to magic.

Yann Martel: I write because it passes the time in a creative way. I have the usual allotment of daylight hours, and between writing and pretty much anything else, I’d rather be writing. What’s beautiful about writing is that it contradicts King Lear: something does come of nothing. Where once there was nothing, now there is a story and writing that story feels like the building of a cathedral. It’s a slow, deliberate process. An initial idea leads to research; research leads to further ideas; ideas and research lead to copious notes; these notes become the structure of a story; then comes the writing and the rewriting until finally the story emerges, flowing as if it had been created spontaneously, with no premeditation. Creating that illusion, working on it, is deeply satisfying. As for why we write in this deep way, I think it’s connected to our quest for meaning in life. Animals don’t seek to understand why they are. We do. And stories – art in general – are the best way to find meaning, which, as an aside, is why religions, another meaning-creator, always tell stories.

What has been the role of the written word in social change?

Maya Angelou: It’s interesting, but this made me think of an incident in the American Revolution. There was a patriot named Patrick Henry. The soldiers of the time were poorly fed, poorly dressed, poorly clothed, cold, wet and hungry. In order to keep their spirits up, Patrick Henry wrote inflammatory but beautifully eloquent lines. Since most of the soldiers were illiterate, he used to go up and down the rows of soldiers reciting these lines. One of them was: ‘I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.’ His words aroused order in the fighting men and, for a while, made them forget their misery. The written word, when it is really eloquent, when it doesn’t have to be parsed or taken apart, when it speaks from one flame to another, speaks to a dying flame and reinvigorates. That’s when it’s powerful. That’s true of all the passions, be they romantic, patriotic or otherwise. The written word confirms that you really can be more than you feel yourself to be right there, in that moment. When I was a young girl, I would read Shakespearian sonnets. At one point I thought Shakespeare was a black girl, a black American girl in the South. I had been sexually abused when I was young, and I stopped talking altogether from the time I was seven till the time I was about thirteen. At the time, I thought everyone could look at me and see that a man had abused me, and that they thought I had liked it. I read, ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone bemoan my outcast state,’ and it connected with me – and then teachers told me that Shakespeare was a white man, an English man, that he lived four centuries earlier. I thought they couldn’t possibly know what they were talking about. No white man could know what I feel.

Andrew Motion: Poems create change, but not in the same way that someone passing a law can. Poetry can’t make you put on a seatbelt while you’re driving! Poetry creates a world of possibilities and ambiguities, and allows us to see our world through a number of perspectives. If that is having the maximum effect on us, it will impact on how we behave in the world. Poems can also help us to crystallize ideas of the past. W. H. Auden once said, ‘Poetry makes nothing happen,’ and I know what he means. We might read that as a disappointment, but it might also be a relief! The rest of our world has this imbued intentionality – it’s designed to make something happen. Auden writes about the 1930s as a low, dishonest decade. His writing profoundly affects our sense of what that time was like. If we face our present and future, and come to terms with it by understanding our past, Auden is actually a very good example of how the crystallization of a moment can change our future.

Lemn Sissay: Poems ride on horseback ahead of our journey. They are fierce chroniclers of the past and wild predictors of the future. They are statements of the present. If you want to know the voice of the people, listen to the poets and watch the artists. We learn more from the poets and the arts about the human condition than through any other medium. But poetry alone is dead. It must connect inside the poem, otherwise it is soulless, self-indulgent twaddle.

George the Poet: Poetry has no hiding places. You can’t write poetry without making a stance. All you have is your words, and those words have to resonate. The most powerful will resonate universally. Human truths always prevail. If equality is true, if love is true, in the space of poetry it will come to the fore. You can’t hide behind music, physical actions or anything else – you have to speak and be understood. The truth of poetry goes hand in hand with social change.

Black Thought: Art has always played a role in revolution, evolution and change. Art has always been a great changing force, the great common denominator, and a force to help people understand the world we live in and the people within that world. The darkest times in our history have brought about some of the most interesting art, in every genre. All the best forms of expression have come about during more trying and turbulent points in our story. Hard times are good for the arts – that’s when people rise to their calling. When times are tough, that’s when people look inside, find their purpose and speak to it. Art is a catalyst, a narrative, and is made up of the personal stories of the people who choose to be a part of its movement. Through art you can discover, at a very deep level, that there are other people in the world who feel the way you do, who see things the way you do, or want the change that you do. Art is our time capsule. It speaks to generations to come about what it was like to live in these days and times.

What is the role of storytelling in our culture?

Maya Angelou: We use it to encourage the new generation to understand something to allow them to step forward without going back, without having to repeat everything. That’s the basis of folk tales such as Aesop’s fables. The aim of storytelling is to get a message across, so the next generation can take it on without having to go back repeating my mistakes, or the mistakes I let myself make, or was fooled into making.

Yann Martel: It is the glue that binds us together. With no stories – personal, familial, local, national, global – we are nothing; that is, we’re solitary animals, dumbly crossing a plain, not knowing where we are going or why. Stories define us, telling us who we are, giving us direction.

I didn’t realize the power of poetry until I needed it. At school, poetry was something you had to study and dissect, like a frog; it never really meant anything to me, and I didn’t understand it. But getting older, and experiencing the ecstasy of love, the pain of loss, as well as the depths of darkness, I realized that poetry has a power. It’s not just words that rhyme – for me, it’s like painting with words, and it somehow connects you deeply and directly to emotion and understanding like nothing else. Poetry became very personal for me as I went through a decade or more of serious depression. I was practically unable to communicate what I was going through until I found poetry gave me a voice. So, it’s a part of culture that I hold extremely close to my heart.

What is the role of poetry in culture?

Maya Angelou: Poetry is written word, but it’s also music, so it has a double strength. The written word, when in prose, has music within it, but it’s not as heavily endowed with it. If you listen to poetry when it’s spoken, you’re drawn in. There’s a magnetism that draws you to it and that’s partly because of the music. People also don’t stop to realize that the lyrics in The Beatles’ songs, in blues and in spiritual music are all poetry. Young people say, ‘I don’t like poetry,’ but they may love Elvis or Ray Charles, and they’re all poetry.

Lemn Sissay: Poetry is at the heart of revolution and revolution is at the heart of the poet. What is the role of the poet in culture? I’m unsure if it’s a question for a poet to answer. Although I have seen poets read for presidents and have read poetry in newspapers, I’ve seen poetry celebrate boxers and beauticians. I’ve seen poetry set to classical music and poetry in deep house music. I’ve seen poetry in punk rock and poetry in the charts. Poets nominated for the Mercury Prize and poetry at the National Theatre. Adele began as a poet. Amy Winehouse began as a poet. Don’t think of me as someone desperately trying to find a link with an age-old tradition and the modern day. Just take a closer look and use your God-given eyes. Poetry is more popular now than it has ever been since the beginning of time. Big statement, right? But it’s true. It is the poet’s role to create. That is the only role in culture. I wish more people did it. I wish more people sat on the branch and cast their line into the vast open space of the imagination. The poet must express herself through the poem. This is how she proves herself to be alive. Cultural commentators of one sort or another will define the role of poetry and promote their definitions ad nauseam. The one consistent is the poet as creator of poem and this is all she need know. I wouldn’t want to limit its role by defining it unless I’m coaxed down a rabbit hole. Sorry.

Saul Williams: The perceived distancing of poetry from the people is only true of some societies. If you go to Ireland, for example, poetry is very much alive – kids can recite Seamus Heaney. In the Middle East, kids can recite Rumi. Some cultures realize that poetry represents their essence. Poetry will always bring us back to our centre, and regardless of how far out we’ve gone in the spiral of business or capitalist mayhem, poetry always brings us home. Poetry operates in a safe space, but it’s not always required to be safe. In many nations, poets are imprisoned! They can incite. They hold the keys to dismantle the system. They can make things clear, and can help our understanding of religion, humankind, society, gender and so many other topics. Poetry addresses the common stories of humanity in simple and complex forms, bringing light to these topics. When you identify poetry as culture, you are identifying the essence of culture. Something that isn’t talked about in America much is the fact that when Alexander Graham Bell first created the phonograph (the record player), the first people he recorded were poets. Before radio, the most common pastime in America was to gather around the table after dinner and recite poems. The first recordings ever were poets. Just think about how important that is.

What makes a truly great piece of writing?

Maya Angelou: The truth. It either tells the truth, or it’s not of very much use. If it tells the truth, whether it’s Tolstoy writing it or Germaine Greer, Toni Morrison or Langston Hughes, or even Confucius, if it tells a real truth, a human truth, then the old white man who’s sitting on his porch in Savannah, Georgia, or the Asian woman in San Francisco, or the rancher in Kansas, can all say, ‘That’s the truth.’ Autobiography enchants me as a form. Years ago, I was asked by an editor in New York whether I would consider writing an autobiography. I said, ‘No, I’m a dramatist and a poet,’ and he said, ‘Well, it’s just as well you don’t try. To make an autobiography, to write it really well, and to make it of importance, is almost impossible.’ My close friend – like a brother – was James Baldwin. I know that editor said to James, ‘Maya Angelou refuses to write, I don’t know what to do,’ and James said, ‘If you want Maya to do something, tell her she can’t do it.’ Fifty years later, he still denies it.

Yann Martel: A great piece of writing contains a suitcase that can be opened at every age and affect us. So the Iliad, for example, despite being nearly three thousand years old, still moves us because of the situation the characters are caught in, the tragedy of their excessive emotions and the tragedy of the arbitrary pains that are sent their way by fickle gods. This suitcase can’t just contain an emotive charge. That’s essential, of course – if we feel nothing for a piece of writing, we will not involve ourselves with it. But the effect must go deeper. A great piece of writing must also illuminate intellectually. It must make one think differently. It’s those two – emotive charge and intellectual insight – combined in a masterly fashion that allows a text to sail through time, ever fresh.

How does the written word sit alongside other forms of culture?

Maya Angelou: The written word is the base of culture, the spine. The other limbs and torso that attach to the spine, still depend upon the spine. Without the written word, there can be no other form of communication. One of the sadnesses I see today is young people who have no belief or faith in tomorrow. You see people who go from knowing nothing to believing nothing, and that’s very sad. When people allow themselves no vocabulary with which to explain themselves to other people, and reduce their utterances to ‘yeah’, ‘mmmhmm’, ‘I dig’, it’s very sad. You cannot, then, explain the delicacies of existence and the nuances of the human mind.

Yann Martel: We’re verbal animals. Words are used in nearly every interaction between human beings. Not that silence and gestures don’t have their place. But words are it. They make us human. So they find their way into nearly every human activity. Everything we do can be done to the song of words. We can speak as we make love, as we fight, as we dance. So there’s no art form that I’m aware of that doesn’t make use of words, at least in the conception. Visual arts and choreography, for example, may not use words in the final work, but words, spoken and written, will likely have been used earlier. So to answer your question: words sit alongside other forms of culture very well.

Can fiction and storytelling counter ingrained narratives around gender, sexuality, race, etc.?

Elif Shafak: Over the years, with each new novel I came to meet readers from diverse backgrounds. For instance, in Turkey, when you look at the people coming to my talks or waiting in the queue to have their books signed, you will notice how different they actually are. Among them are lots of leftists, liberals, secularists, feminists, but also Sufis and mystics. And then, conservatives and religious women with headscarves. Among them are Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Alevis. To me this is incredibly important. In a country where everybody is divided into mental ghettos and isolated cultural islands, it matters to me that literature keeps its doors open to people of all backgrounds. I have to tell you, many of my readers in Turkey are xenophobic. This is the way they have been raised. So, if you ask their opinions about minorities, most probably they will say highly biased things. Likewise, many of my readers are homophobic. This is the only narrative they have heard in their society. But then the same people come and say to me, ‘You know what? I have read your novel and this is the character that I loved the most,’ and maybe the fictional character they are referring to is Armenian, Greek or Jewish, gay, bisexual or transsexual. I have thought about this dilemma a lot. How is it possible that people who are more biased and intolerant in the public space tend to become a bit more open-minded when they are alone? I don’t think it is a coincidence.

What is the role of the written word in youth culture?

Maya Angelou: I don’t mean to look down on Facebook and the like, but somehow, because we have technology – and because the television and other hangers-on have arrived – it seems things have changed. Texting has entered into the psyche so thoroughly that hundreds of people are being killed because they text while driving, and text while walking – and even walk into walls! It’s really sad. I am not talking about throwing away technology. We have to build on our strengths and use what we have that has proven to be of use as fully as possible. Youth are not without their heroes and sheroes. Sometimes, especially when you hear the statements and utterances of their heroes and sheroes, you wonder why they chose them. I’m very blessed – I’m a six-foot-tall African-American woman, and when I go to the stadia, five thousand or ten thousand will pay to hear what I say. It’s a blessing. Just now, a producer from another programme told me that I have over 3,800,000 fans on Facebook, and most of those people are young. That tells me people are asking for something, they want something. I try to tell them the truth, and hope it gets through. I’m not the only one; there are lots and lots of people who care enough about young people to try and tell them the truth, and encourage them to strengthen themselves.

Do you think writing must have an ethical or moral responsibility?

Maya Angelou: I think that’s true for everybody – the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. Everyone has a moral responsibility to the other human being. You have to tell the truth in such a way that it can be seen and understood by another person, in another country. Like Terence said, ‘I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me.’ When you look in the encyclopaedia, you see him – Publius Terentius Afer, known as Terence. He was an African slave, sold to a Roman senator, who was later freed by that senator. He became one of the most popular playwrights in Rome without ever knowing that he would become a citizen of Rome in that time. That statement and some of his plays stand here today, having come from 154 BC. ‘I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me.’

Yann Martel: No. Art is witness. It witnesses everything, the good and the bad. It’s not just good people who write good books. And good books don’t necessarily tell uplifting stories that have happy endings. Look at pop music. Pop lyrics are often quite depraved. Doesn’t mean they’re not great pop songs. But the truth is that writing is an effort and an artifice. It demands hard work. And it’s rare the writer, I think, will go through all that work simply to negate life. I don’t believe in literary nihilism. The true literary nihilist would simply not write. It’s rather a starting point, a dilemma, which either the writer resolves to some extent, or the reader, applying his or her sense of irony.

Why does so much of our written culture reflect a nostalgic sense of past?

Elif Shafak: Well, I come from a society of collective amnesia. Walk around Istanbul and you will instantly notice what a rich history it has and yet our memory of the past is paper-thin. That contradiction has always struck me. I believe memory is a responsibility. Not to get stuck in the past but to learn from the past, to see its beauties and atrocities and complexities simultaneously. We need a nuanced and calmer approach to history. The problem with ‘rational modernists’ in the Middle East is that they are so future-oriented that they see their model as a total tabula rasa and they fail to notice the continuities in politics and society. The other extreme is shared by a wide spectrum of people ranging from populists to Islamists. These are people who are past-oriented. They sell a dream about a lost golden age. Why lost? Because they took it from us. Who is ‘they’? The answer to this question varies as we move from one country to another. Foreigners or minorities or traitors or external powers. The rhetoric is deeply incendiary. This romanticized version of a glorious past is incredibly dangerous and toxic. I have been writing about how imperial nostalgia has resurfaced in the last decades in Russia, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Germany. We need to pay special attention to those parts of Europe that were once upon a time multinational empires. This notion of ‘lost grandeur’ is constantly being exploited by populist demagogues in these places and beyond.

The ‘algia’ in nostalgia can trace its roots back to the Greek algos, which relates to physical pain and distress. Research has shown that this bittersweet emotion is particularly prominent during times of change and uncertainty, and bittersweet is perhaps the best description – the sweetness of our ability to revisit and relive the good times, the bitterness of distance and even the realization of the impossibility of going back. Whether it’s personal nostalgia (for our own past) or historical nostalgia (for a distant era), we romanticize and connect with nostalgic memories in a way that is deeply emotional – anyone who has experienced it will no doubt attest to this. The triggers for nostalgia are varied, but one of the most powerful is music – an art form, a language, that has the profound ability to revive memories with a level of lucidity that is difficult to attain from many other cultural forms.

What is the role of music in our experience of being human?

Moby: I think the human condition is just baffling for everybody. We are alive for a few decades in a universe that is 14 billion years old and vast beyond our imagining. We may define ourselves as having a fixed age of forty, for example, when the truth is that at a quantum level there is no part of you that is less than 14 billion years old. Music provides us with a strange self-generated celebration of the human condition in the face of a universe that is ancient and vast beyond our understanding.

Hans Zimmer: Music is one of the few things we, as humans, are any good at. If you look at the history of music, way back, you will find things like the Balinese monkey chants. It starts out as a bunch of monkeys yammering in a forest and turns into a chant. If you go to any rave, or any football event, you will find people chanting in a rhythm – human beings do that. We have this sense to participate and organize. This is music at its most crude form. We then go to something more sublime like the second movement of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto; you can’t fail to be moved by it! Music lets you rediscover your humanity, and your connection to humanity. When you listen to Mozart with other people, you feel that somehow we’re all in this together. This is, I suppose, what great poetry strives for.

What is the art of performance for you?

Lang Lang: For me, there is no distance between the performer and the instrument, which with a piano is not easy. With a guitar, you pick it up and hold it – it’s like having a friend next to you. With a violin; it’s like playing music with the instrument. A piano has this physicality to it; it’s standing there and you have to put more effort in to get the instrument to play. You can’t sit there and let your hands play; you have to get connected through your head and your heart before you even play one note.

Is genre an extension of culture?

Moby: All the variables that contribute to the birth, sustenance and morphing of a genre, and the way in which people feel married to a genre, enter the realm of chaos theory. The variables are myriad and unknowable. You could give a glib answer and say that rock ’n’ roll came from white trash guys who liked black R&B – but it’s so much more complicated than that. I don’t want to sound too esoteric, but I do think a lot of this has to do with neural plasticity. As time passes, neuroscientists become more aware of how fluid and plastic the brain can be, but research also shows there is a wilful desire to hold on to a degree of rigidity – maintaining things that are familiar, and to which we have allegiance. We see this a lot with patriotism and attachment to sports teams, but it also leads to genre. It’s not just a preference, but an atavistic tribal allegiance. There used to be a utilitarian aspect to this. When records were expensive and hard to come by, the purchase of one used to be an expression of allegiance to a genre. Now, music is ubiquitous and barely costs anything, so it seems that as time passes, genre is becoming more of an antiquated idea. If we were having this conversation thirty years ago, almost everybody you and I were friends with would have had genres they were very deeply attached to. When I think of all of my friends now, rarely do they speak in terms of genre, but rather in terms of music that they like.

Hans Zimmer: Absolutely! For example, I have always believed that rap music, in one way or another, grew out of the blues and work songs. It’s a genre where pretty strong political and social ideas are expressed. European art music, on the other hand, comes out of a need to play nice music for people’s expensive dinner, or the opera. One is real and authentic and charges forward, while the other is becoming redundant and hanging on for dear life. You have so many varieties. Militaristic music, which I don’t think is music at all – in fact I believe it is a horrible proclamation, a misuse of music. There’s a reason why there are a million and one love songs – they all try and say the same thing, albeit in slightly different ways. In popular music, you have the notion of the band. There is something about being young and coming together with three other guys to form a band and make music. It’s a natural thing. To make great music, you have to have that certain recklessness which you have when you’re young. I think this is why a lot of bands fall apart. The recklessness and the adventurousness are there, but I don’t think they know how to be socially fair to each other. They have to behave as one single body, with collective responsibility for the sound they make.

Lang Lang: When you speak of classical music, you are really speaking of a period, not a genre. Within that umbrella you have baroque, romantic, impressionist, contemporary and many more genres of classical. Many people have the wrong understanding and hear something and think, ‘Ah, this is classical,’ when, in fact, it is just like any other music but perhaps more structured, more calculated. Music is there to express personal moments, emotions and passions. That may be through a three- or four-minute pop song, a thirty-minute sonata. They will both take you on an emotional journey, just with different peaks and valleys. Regardless of genre, the idea of making music is the same; it’s there to express your personal opinions.

What is the relationship of music to language?

Moby: This is an issue that Western philosophy has been dealing with for millennia: the question of what can be known and how it can be communicated. In the early twentieth century when Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he basically tried to answer this question, saying that the only meaningful way that human beings can communicate is through mathematics. He felt this [maths] was a language that left no room for interpretation or subjectivity. A few decades later, he almost refuted this. He didn’t say that art, speaking and writing had no meaning, but rather that they were inherently subjective forms of communication. Music transcends the limits of language. The English lexicon is vast, but still is limited. Music comes in to fill the gap. It looks at the way we can’t express ourselves through the spoken or written word and makes up for the lack.

Hans Zimmer: Music is definitely an extension of language. Bernstein explained this beautifully in his Harvard Lectures where he talked on how music came about. We have one universal word, ‘mama’. If you sing it a little faster and a little louder, mama will hear you and come and feed you. In this sense, music had a survival necessity. Like all good things, sooner or later we get past bare survival and turn things into art.

Lang Lang: Music stays with you. If you keep practising and keep playing, it will be with you for your whole life – and what a gift that is. In my own life, the fame and other things are obviously important, but nothing can replace the gift of music in my life. It’s the real treasure I have. The gift of music is like the treasure you find on a treasure island. You don’t have to be a master; it’s an art that can give you a fantastic feeling, regardless of your skills, age, wealth, location. It will stay with you – it’s special, unique, beautiful. Successful music stays in our hearts. It may be Bach or Beethoven; it may be K-pop or EDM. It’s like the great works of Shakespeare – the pieces that connect with our hearts hold a really unique position in society, like traditional fairy tales, novels or plays. Music remains in our roots, and helps us grow, improve and be better. It reminds us of our past, and also speaks to our present day and our future.

There may appear to be a disagreement between Moby and Hans here, but whether we consider music to be an extension of or transcendence from language, the thesis is broadly similar: that music allows communication of concepts that cannot be adequately conveyed in our traditional written forms.

For me, it’s impossible to tell the story of culture without film. The moving image has been with us as long as we have made art. From prehistoric shadowgraphy, through to shadow puppetry and camera obscura, we have been fascinated by creating and observing moving depictions of culturally and socially significant aspects of life. It was not until the mid-1800s, as technology became sufficiently advanced, that we began to see film, as we would recognize it today, being produced – inventors and artists started not just to document life, but to create narratives to tell stories. There is something primal and comforting about how we connect to moving images; perhaps because we are hardwired to detect and respond to motion in our environment. That direct connection from moving image to emotional response may explain why film and cinema dominate culture.

Why has film become such an important part of culture?

Paul Greengrass: Films are commerce and art; that’s been the way since the beginning, like theatre. Film has a central place in culture because it’s demotic, everyone can access and understand it – moving pictures have an instant accessibility, they get into your unconscious mind. There is a beauty to the collective experience of going to the cinema. The great David Lean used to say that when he was a boy, and went to the cinema, he looked at the beam of light coming down towards the screen as if it were the light coming through a cathedral window; it gave him a pious sensation – and there’s something to that. Cinema has a mystery, a magic. That’s not to say it’s better or worse than any other art form, but it has an emotional potency as a creator of moods and memory. It has the power to make people jump, make people move, make people cry, make people identify with characters who are like them or who they would like to be.

What is the role of cinema as a mode of expression?

Ken Loach: Cinema has always been this contradiction. On one hand, it’s a medium that provides almost infinite possibilities in terms of images, sound, drama and observation. It uses stories like novels and theatre, uses sound, music, and has all these elements which can then be edited to do anything. The possibilities of cinema are wide and deep, so why shouldn’t it use that language expressively? Well, cinema has always been a commercial undertaking too. From the first shows, they were like diversions – connected to fairs, commerce and entertainment. Right at the onset of theatre you had the Elizabethan, Jacobean dramatists who were writing as profoundly as anyone as could imagine, but in cinema, you didn’t have that. It was commerce. These are the two tensions. Commerce is in the hands of multinational companies, cinemas are owned by multinational companies – and cinema is just one part of a range of interests of these huge companies. The financial pulling power can be seen in the form of Hollywood or Bollywood – money has ruled what cinema has become and the rest of the industry is left with a tiny fragment of space, better known as art houses. Even they are now becoming owned by multinational companies, and so films that do not have a big commercial element have a narrow chance of success. A lot of people want to make creative, expressive cinema – but there just isn’t the space left to show it.

What constitutes a great story?

Ken Loach: I’ve always worked directly with writers, and stories often come out of those conversations – and shared views of the world. A good story reveals a whole truth about society – it’s not just a group of characters. You have to reveal something more profound than just those individual lives or situations; a story is a conversation. You will get a hunch of what is significant, what’s cutting, what’s imaginative, what’s funny. The aim for me is to find a story that may seem small, but which sheds light on a much deeper issue or conflict; a microcosm that reflects something much greater.

Cinema is undeniably powerful and in India you see this viscerally. Film for most Indians has become almost inseparable from identity. The more than a thousand films released each year in Bollywood (the catch-all term for Indian cinema) are the forum through which billions of Indians reflect on issues of society and culture. Stars of the screen are worshipped in a manner close to idolatry, and carry incredible power and influence in India. Growing up in an Indian diaspora household I saw this first-hand. For my parents, not only was Indian cinema a nostalgic link back to ‘home’, but it was also a way of understanding the ebb and flow of the transformation of Indian culture through time.

What is the relationship of film to Indian culture?

Siddharth Roy Kapur: Indian cinema has been in existence for more than a hundred years, and for most of that time it has been really the primary mode of mass entertainment for our country. India has, for a long time, been a very poor country and it’s only in the past decade and a half that we’ve been able to pull a fair number of people above the poverty line; but we have a long way to go. In an environment like that, cinema formed a means of escapism for people, from what they had to go through in their daily lives. Those three hours in a movie theatre gave people a chance to forget their woes and become one with their hero or heroine on screen. That is also perhaps why so much of our cinema has been escapist entertainment – people’s lives were hard enough without them having to deal with those same harsh realities on screen. Cinema is integral to Indian culture, has deep roots in daily life, and regardless of the platform, has just as much resonance today as at any time before.

Is Indian cinema reflecting a more diverse nation?

Ritesh Sidhwani: When we were shooting Made in Heaven, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code had ruled that consensual same-sex acts were unconstitutional and thus illegal. In this series, we had depicted same-sex relationships, and expressing these things would have been a serious infringement of the law! In a secular, democratic country, where liberal values were growing, this went against what we stood for. By the time we had finished shooting, the Supreme Court had abolished Section 377, and it meant a lot of people could express their freedom and talk about it. Sometimes, you do get a certain idea and get inspired because it’s important for that story to be told. Sometimes you hear this groundswell across the country around an issue, and that creates narratives that need to be shared and expressed. Indian audiences are exposed to culture from around the world, and even content from elsewhere can inspire and influence culture, and the stories told to and of culture.

Siddharth Roy Kapur: Even in the 1940s, 50s and 70s we had plenty of films that spoke to the taboos of society, but today we’re seeing a much greater diversity of subjects in Indian cinema than we’ve had before. Traditionally, Indian cinema has had to be all things to all people; films had to have a mix of romance, tragedy, comedy, great songs, dances, an imposing villain, gorgeous stars and great locations. For a film to be successful, it had to have all of that – and that’s the Bollywood genre, right? As tastes have widened, and we’re exposed to more global cinema, people have moved to a level where they’re ready to be able to enjoy something that is not just escapism. You are dealing with subjects that talk to society as it is today, and while the escapist fare still does extremely well, you now have a whole other array of commercial cinema that deals with subjects which, just a few years ago, would have been relegated to art-house cinema or parallel cinema.

What is the role of music in Bollywood?

Ritesh Sidhwani: Everything in India is celebrated with music! A wedding would not be complete without a sangeet evening. Music is ingrained, we express everything with music. In cinema, whatever the situation, whether it’s celebrating, mourning, grieving, it’s brought to life with music. It is as much a part of our culture as, say, martial arts are to Chinese culture. In earlier times, however, you’d suddenly have characters that break out into song and you’d have these dream sequences where suddenly your characters are on the Swiss Alps, romancing around a tree. But that’s changing, and music is now being seamlessly written into screenplays. Of course, there are exceptions. In our film Gully Boy, we had eighteen or nineteen different tracks made in collaboration with over thirty artists. Everything in that film was expressed through music, specifically the underground rap circuit, which was not considered mainstream in India, but which was the hook for the film – it was a powerful subculture which deserved to become mainstream.

Siddharth Roy Kapur: Indian movies have always used music in their narratives extremely effectively and extensively. While the way it’s used may change (we don’t have that many playback songs any more with lip-sync), we still have those musical underlays to movie sequences that bring out the stories and help the writer to tell the story they want to on screen.

As an art form, photography is able to communicate something unique; it is a fixed moment in space and time that tells a story, much like the written word. This connection between writing and the image is perhaps why it is no accident that the word photography itself is derived from the Greek words phos (for light) and grapho (for writing) – but photography has a much deeper cultural meaning for us, as writer and philosopher Vilém Flusser explains: ‘Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings “ex-ist”, i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible.’

What is the role of photography in culture?

David Bailey: Photography was the first great recording, allowing people to record the moment. The moment is the only thing you’ve got when you think about it. As we’re talking now, we’re already history, but a photograph can turn it into a moment. Forget all the art shit and all that nonsense – people keep albums to keep memories alive. Your brain can’t cope with all your memories. As you get older, your hard drive gets overloaded. If you see a snap from the 1970s or whatever, you might think, ‘Oh, I remember that moment!’, but if you didn’t have it, the moment would have been gone for ever, and nobody would remember it. Photography is a great moment-taker, much more than movies.

What is the role of photography in understanding ourselves?

Rankin: That’s pretty complex as I know a lot of people would probably say that photography actually confuses us more than it helps us understand ourselves or the world. To me, photography is a tool and like most tools it can be used for good or bad. When you pick up a camera, I think you have a responsibility that goes with that camera; what are you going to use it for? At its best, I think the best photographs in any genre – documentary, fashion, art – attempt to hold a mirror up to society, try to show it for what it is, to expose or bring attention to, say, how ridiculous or incredible it is. At its worst, photography can be used for pure evil and at its most banal it gets used to sell stuff. I see the selfie as an attempt to use photography to sell a false ideal of yourself to yourself. How sad is that!

Can photographs change the world?

David Bailey: A photograph stopped the Vietnam War, I think – the girl on fire. It’s just a press picture. That’s not art, it’s being there. Taking a picture and making a picture are two different things. I’m not saying taking a picture isn’t important – it is, if it’s the right picture, in the right place. But you can’t call it art – if there were five hundred photographers stood next to you, they would all have taken the same fucking picture. The other famous picture, of the bloke shooting a guy? Turns out it gave the wrong impression because the bloke was a real arsehole.

I then asked David about today’s world: what does photography teach us about the world we live in?

There are too many people in the world. Politicians go on about petrol, but the simple thing, which is so obvious, is that there’s too many people. Eventually, the world won’t be able to take it. Scientists aren’t going to solve it, unless we can find a cheap way to go to other planets; and they’re not going to do that. It’s a bit like Easter Island – they cut down all the trees, burnt them and they were stuck on the island. And the earth is just an island in the universe. The only other thing that could unite the human race is the discovery of aliens.

I also asked him what he thought about aliens, about those unknown phenomena – and about God.

I can only go by my common sense, which is very limited. If I met God, I wouldn’t be able to comprehend him anyway. I don’t believe in God. I believe there’s something else, maybe quantum maths, who knows? Or maybe we’re the dream of Krishna, who knows? Collective electricity – I don’t know what the fuck it is, and if someone showed me, I couldn’t comprehend it; my brain’s not big enough. We’ll never find out who God is, our brains just aren’t big enough! There’s a story that when Captain Cook first came into contact with Aborigines, they couldn’t see his boats because they couldn’t comprehend them. That’s a bit like seeing God, on a lower level.

Rankin: I’m a great admirer of Toscani, who, for me, made some of the boldest statements you’ll ever see in advertising. He went so far the other way with his approach that it made people stop and think about what they were doing in life. His Colors of Benetton campaigns were so in-your-face yet extremely simple, which is why they were so shocking. I think they are a good example of how images that might be from what is normally seen as an insipid genre can change the way people think. As a photographer it’s so important to remember the person, the human being that we all are. Whether it’s somebody in the Congo or an A-list celebrity, it only takes one image to change societies’ opinions or the general consciousness. As I’ve said, for me, the best imagery is about exposing something to the world that the world’s never seen before, or putting a mirror up to society and being critical or ironic, amusing or celebrating it.

What is the power of art?

Tracey Emin: This is going to sound really nutty, but just go along with me on this. I can’t prove it, but I really, really, really do think that true art – art with conviction, with emotion – carries a certain amount of weight, like the weight of things, the emotional weight of the world. It’s like all that emotional hell, screaming, passion and whatever else goes into the artwork is sucked into it, and they just emit, like capsules, pulsing and breathing wherever they exist. Art takes the strain, takes the pressure, takes the fear, takes the indulgence. It’s like an atom of sorts, all this emotion that has gone into these paintings, into these atoms of paint, glued together. They don’t explode, they don’t go crazy, they just live on a wall shaking. That’s why art needs to exist. That’s also how I know when my own work is good and when it isn’t, and it’s why I paint over such a lot of what I do. I can paint a good picture – fucking hell, it’s so easy for me to do that – but it’s not about that. That’s the job of a picture maker, and I’m not a picture maker. Art is about something else for me. If I don’t do it how I want to do it, there’s no point.

What is the relationship of younger generations to art as a movement?

Black Thought: I don’t think the art, the fashion, the sound of millennials is catered to the palate of someone my age, but nevertheless it’s art. It’s their art. The medium of the art of millennials is technology and that’s how they express themselves. It’s not necessary or intended for us to understand. I try to appreciate it for what it is. It may seem shallow at face value, but it has its own truth and depth. There are many millennials who make visceral material. If I think back to when I was in my twenties, I wasn’t necessarily as concerned with what people my parents’ age thought about what I was doing as I was about what my peers felt.

An examination of culture, however, would be incomplete without considering food. Food is not just one of the basic things needed by all living things for survival (alongside air, water, shelter and habitat); it is nutrition, nature, culture, spirituality, social good, desideratum, an aesthetic object and art. It is simultaneously the most social and intimate of activities, engaging our senses in a manner rarely achieved by any other aspect of our lives. Most of our global cultures are defined by their relationship with food; it is a way of communicating identity and heritage, as well as being deeply symbolic and playing a central role in many ceremonies. Growing up in a Hindu household, there was little doubt for me about the cultural importance of food; it was everything. Heston Blumenthal and Alain Ducasse are two of the most important chefs of our generation, but much more than that, they are philosophers and renaissance thinkers. To better understand the role of food in culture, I could not think of a more perfect pair to speak to.

Why is food so important to us?

Heston Blumenthal: We have the unique ability to imagine things that don’t exist, enabling us to create shared beliefs and culture: language, religion, science, maths, music, farming, dancing, social media, states, nations, football teams – these are all shared beliefs. And of course, you have the two biggest shared beliefs: money and time. Behind all this is consciousness, the evolution of which is closely linked to our ability to find food – and today, we don’t have to climb mountains and kill to feed our family. Food has become easy to get. We’ve domesticated ourselves! Our most intimate relationship is with air – we need it to breathe – and then the liquids and solids we put in our mouth for fuel. After that, it’s with other objects and creatures – mountains, fish, animals, everything. First, in order to have a journey at all, though, you need to drink and eat.

As a species, we began as hunter-gatherers, where small groups of people would keep each other alive by finding food. Our entire endocrine and hormonal system was developed through this process. We had to develop shared culture around food to survive. We hunted and gathered, prepared and ate, and were driven by hormones and emotions. Imagine those early humans finding a mushroom on the forest floor. In that group, someone had to be the first to take a bite of that mushroom and, if they survived, they could tell others, ‘That one’s fine, we can eat that.’ And that’s how it was for thousands of years, keeping each other alive through food. Fast-forward a few thousand years, and we had the emergence of agriculture; we cultivated and grew, and we had a surplus to trade – we went from valuing the moment as hunter-gathers to valuing the asset of food and being fearful of losing it. Fast-forward a few thousand more years to today: we live in a society where most common diseases are almost eradicated, replaced with diseases like loneliness, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s and so on – but we generally live longer and, relatively, more comfortably than ever before, and so we’re fearful of losing that.

What is the role of food in our culture?

Heston Blumenthal: 13.8 billion years ago, a big bang happened. Not the Big Bang, but a big bang. As a result of that interaction, molecules and atoms formed (chemistry), some of those formed organisms (biology), all of them exist in a system governed by mathematics and predictable structures (physics) and some of those organisms evolved consciousness (history). Cooking and eating are the only way you cross all of these areas. You get plants, meat, fish, fruit, ingredients, and you do something to them. You chop them, heat them, put them in coal – you do something to them (physics). That produces physical and chemical reactions that produce aromas and textures as the molecules and particles change (chemistry). You eat it (that’s biology). If you like it, maybe you’ll write a recipe (history). Food covers everything: physics, chemistry, biology, language, mathematics, music, dance, philosophy, psychology, geology, geography – everything. Yet we’ve taken it off most of our curricula and don’t give it the educational attention it deserves. The responsibility is not for me, or you, as individuals, but to make sure that we teach kids about food – and how that can give them the opportunity to be more aware of themselves, their connection to the world, and each other. The more you relate to the food you eat, the more you are consciously present as you eat – the less you eat, because you value the food more. It’s mindfulness. You can dig your hand into a bowl of raisins and stuff your mouth, or you can take each raisin, look at its structure, texture, feel it, and then really examine the taste as you eat it, the flavour, the sensation, your relationship with it. It’s intimate, and we take it for granted.

Alain Ducasse: Food is central to human lives – whatever the epoch, wherever in the world. Brillat-Savarin said it very rightly: ‘Tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you who you are.’ First of all, food is a link between humans and nature. Eating requires selecting produce considered as eatable. It also encapsulates a cultural vision of what a meal must be: what to eat according to circumstances, how to prepare the dishes and, most importantly, how to share this moment. The table is a concentrate of humankind. It is the most civilized place in the world.

I don’t wish to downplay the challenges of your life, or mine, but in comparison to the horror of existence for the vast majority of the story of our species, we have it, for the most part, relatively easy. For most of our time on this planet, our life expectancy was frighteningly short – close to a third of what we now consider relatively normal – and most of that life was a fight for sheer survival, perhaps closer to what we now consider life in the natural world.

Our superpower, however, comes in the form of a squishy 1.7-kg supercomputer that we all carry around with us – a device that not only gives us a sense of consciousness, but also allows us to position ourselves in space and time. Thus we, as individuals and groups, know we have a history, a future and a mortality, and this is reflected in our culture. As Yann Martel told me, as far as we know, animals don’t seek to understand who they are, but we do. Maya Angelou echoed this sentiment when she described how we all have an impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings through art, through love, through the written word. It sets us apart from other species, and is perhaps our greatest gift.

Art is a meaning-finding pursuit, and alongside the earliest fragments of human presence, we find evidence of this as our glyphs and depictions share knowledge, news, beauty and even the basal assertions of existence – the historic equivalent of scrawling ‘I woz ’ere’ into stone. As we advanced, so too did the assertions of our existence and the ways in which we shared knowledge and history. We developed more sophisticated language, art, poetry, music and film – more sophisticated ways to assert our existence, to share our stories, our knowledge, our history and our future. Art as culture has always been a great changing force, the great common denominator, to help people understand the world we live in, as well as each other.

Culture is the amalgamation of this; it gives context to our lives, and a lens for us to make sense of everything. As Yann Martel said during my interview with him, without culture, without stories, ‘we’re simply solitary animals, dumbly crossing a plain, not knowing where we’re going or why’. Stories in the form of culture give us the answer; they tell us who we are, and the trajectory of where we travel. Culture is abstract, yet tangible – and if we were to be poetic and ask what culture is made of, I think the answer would be simple: our truth.

Biographies

Dr Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was an American poet, memoirist and civil rights activist. She is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

David Bailey CBE is a fashion and portrait photographer who is credited with helping create the ‘Swinging London’ of the 1960s and was the inspiration for the lead character in the film Blow-Up (1966).

Black Thought is an American rapper and the lead MC of the Grammy award-winning hip-hop group the Roots, which he co-founded with drummer Questlove.

Heston Blumenthal OBE is a British celebrity chef and TV presenter. His restaurant, The Fat Duck, one of five restaurants in the UK to have three Michelin stars, was voted number-one restaurant in the world in 2005.

Ed Catmull is an American computer scientist, co-founder of Pixar and president of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Alain Ducasse is a French chef and is the owner of over twenty restaurants around the globe, including three with three Michelin stars.

Tracey Emin CBE is an artist and member of the Royal Academy of Arts. She is known for the autobiographical nature of her work, which she produces in a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, film and neon text installations.

George the Poet is a British spoken-word artist, poet, rapper and award-winning podcast host.

Paul Greengrass is an award-winning film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely known for his use of handheld cameras and dramatizations of historic events.

Siddharth Roy Kapur is a film producer, founder and MD of Roy Kapur Films, and President of Film and Television Producers Guild of India. He was previously Managing Director of The Walt Disney Company India.

Lang Lang is a Chinese concert pianist, educator and philanthropist. He has performed with renowned orchestras all over the world.

Ken Loach is a filmmaker renowned for his socially critical directing style and socialist ideals. His film Kes was voted the seventh greatest British film of the twentieth century in a BFI poll and he has twice won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Yann Martel is a Spanish-born Canadian author of the Man Booker prizewinning Life of Pi, which has sold 12 million copies worldwide and was made into an Academy award-winning film.

Moby is a musician and producer who has sold 20 million records worldwide. Outside of music, he is known for his animal rights activism.

Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, author and biographer. He was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009 and is the founder of the Poetry Archive.

Rankin is a portrait and fashion photographer, and director. He is the co-founder of Dazed and Confused magazine, founder of Hunger magazine and Rankin Film. He has shot portraits of many celebrities, including Kate Moss, David Bowie and Queen Elizabeth II.

Dr Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British author, academic and women’s rights activist. Her books have been translated into fifty-one languages and she has been awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France for her contribution to arts and literature.

Ritesh Sidhwani is an Indian film producer and executive, and co-founder of Excel Entertainment with Farhan Akhtar.

Lemn Sissay MBE is a poet, bestselling author of My Name is Why, and was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize in 2019. He was the official poet of the Olympic Games in 2012 and is Chancellor of the University of Manchester.

Saul Williams is an American rapper and musician specializing in a blend of poetry and hip hop. He also has a career as an actor and starred in the 1998 independent film Slam and the 2013 musical Holler If Ya Hear Me.

Hans Zimmer is a German film-score composer and record producer who has composed music for over 150 films, including The Lion King, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1995.