The Odditorium is a best-selling book that celebrates the tricksters, deviants and pioneers whose obsessions changed the world. Co-author David Bramwell is joined by three of the book’s writers for an evening of entertaining, illuminating and transgressive talks on the themes of sex, pain, art and politics.
Emma Kilbey examines the work and philosophy of Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged/Anthem), a Russian author who sold the American Dream to the Americans, as well as inspiring an epic themed album by Canadian prog rockers Rush. Rand’s brand of extreme selfishness still echo through American politics today, up to and including America’s first orange president, Trump.
John Higgs is the author of Stranger Than We Can Imagine, Making Sense of the 20th Century and KLF: The Band That burned A Million Pounds. He will be putting history straight by revealing how Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, heralded by many as the 20th century’s most important work of art, was actually created by an avant-garde baroness.
Dr Diarmuid Hester uncovers the heroic life of Bob Flanagan, ‘supermasochist’, a performance artist who battled cystic fibrosis with hardcore BDSM and home carpentry to become the disease’s longest -living survivor.
David Bramwell celebrates the life of radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who inspired Kate Bush, Patti Smith, Sean Connery and Kurt Cobain with his wild ideas and inventions that include the cloudbuster and orgone accumulator. It was thanks to Reich’s radical work in sexuality that the Sixties came to be defined by the phrase ‘Make Love Not War’.