The Mediterranean Diet is all the Rage Because it Represents a Way of Life We’ve Lost

The Mediterranean diet has been included on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list since 2010. Cover picture of Issey Miyake SS26 in Paris by Jay Zoo for DAM.

By Marco Romagnoli, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) 

The promise of a long, healthy, happy existence living an active, community-based lifestyle under warm, sunny skies may be within reach. In fact, it could be on your table.

The Mediterranean diet has been included on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list since 2010. Not only does the diet have guaranteed cultural value, it is also a powerful strategic tool for promoting food products such as olive oil.

Often cited for its health benefits, the Mediterranean diet was first described in a 1953 book about Crete. At the time, people were amazed at the low incidence of cardiovascular disease among the inhabitants of this Greek island, compared with northern Europeans.

Among other things, this olive oil-based diet encourages the consumption of fresh foods, seasonal fruit and vegetables and whole grains. It embodies the essence of the Mediterranean lifestyle, according to the UNESCO definition:

The Mediterranean diet involves a set of skills, knowledge, rituals, symbols and traditions concerning crops, harvesting, fishing, animal husbandry, conservation, processing, cooking, and particularly the sharing and consumption of food. Eating together is the foundation of the cultural identity and continuity of communities throughout the Mediterranean Basin. It is a moment of social exchange and communication, an affirmation and renewal of family, group or community identity. 

Olive oil is at the heart of the Mediterranean diet. (Shutterstock)

But beyond its impact on our health, what does the Mediterranean diet say about us as a society? Could it be the symptom of something?

As a postdoctoral researcher at UQAM’s École des sciences de la gestion, my research lies at the intersection of heritage and tourism studies, food and mental health.

In 2021, I carried out field research in Cilento (Italy), Soria (Spain) and Marseille (France), where I looked at the inhabitants’ attachment to the Mediterranean diet. I listened to their stories and tried to understand the local and social dynamics at play in the Mediterranean diet concept.

Mirroring a deep societal crisis

The concept of the Mediterranean diet refers to a lifestyle that strengthens social relationships and is good for your health. It sounds simple and coherent.

However, the society in which we live turns the work of meeting these basic needs into something more complex. The health and social dimensions of the Mediterranean diet are seen as extremely desirable because they represent a balance that is lacking in globalized societies.

Claude Fischler, a sociologist of human nutrition, describes the multidimensional crisis of the food system in modern societies.

In his view, there is a psychopathology of daily eating underway. This is characterized by “appetite disturbances, bulimic attacks, anxious or compulsive snacking, etc.” Just think of the consumption of ultra-processed foods or ready-made and frozen meals, eaten on their own in front of the TV in the evening or in front of the computer during lunch break.

A meal at the O Vicolo ‘E L'Alleria, in Battipaglia, Italy. Eating together is the foundation of the cultural identity and continuity of communities in the Mediterranean basin. (Author provided)

In this psychopathological perspective on food, which also mirrors a societal crisis, mechanisms for cultural (and in this case, food) reactivation are appearing. The rush to the Mediterranean diet is a reflection of this societal crisis, because it is the opposite of our way of life.

With its inclusion on the UNESCO list, the Mediterranean diet has thus become a prestigious “monument” of Mediterranean culinary art.

This food culture has been mythologized and made a part of our heritage after undergoing an irreversible process of erosion of food production and consumption systems in the Mediterranean area.

‘Gastronativism’: Politics on the plate

The food arena is one of the best places to express the anxieties and fears of contemporary life.

Fabio Parasecoli, a researcher in food studies, describes the anxieties caused by globalization as gastronativism, “the ideological use of food in politics to advance ideas about who belongs to a community (however defined) and who doesn’t.”

So gastronativism represents a political tool that provides “a sense of rootedness, comfort and security” in the face of perceived collapse (climate change, wars, pandemics, globalization).

The Mediterranean diet is part of this gastronativist approach, standing for a lifestyle that can be adopted.

Different meanings of the Mediterranean diet

We often hear about the Mediterranean diet from institutions and academics. What we don’t hear much about are the views of the communities that practise this way of life.

My field research in 2021 aimed to understand the different ways in which the Mediterranean diet is defined, described, understood and lived, depending on the community.

The Mediterranean diet involves a set of skills, knowledge and rituals that relate in particular to cultivation, harvesting and picking. (Shutterstock)

In Cilento, the Mediterranean diet is synonymous with “lifestyle.” It’s part of local identity and a reference to the wider socio-cultural sphere (“our lifestyle,” the locals say).

In Soria, it embodies a “nutritional model” and in the domain of health: the adjectives most commonly used to describe it are “healthy,” “beneficial,” and “health-conscious.”

In Marseille, the term “diet” conjures up images of fasting, deprivation and abstinence, while the term “Mediterranean” refers to organic, seasonal and healthy food. The reference here is more to the food industry.

A sociocultural seismograph

Whether understood as a nutritional model, a way of life or an example of intangible heritage, the Mediterranean diet represents a way out of a system (societal, food, economic, environmental) in crisis and in constant search of reference points.

Seismographs are instruments that record and measure earthquakes. Like a “sociocultural seismograph,” the Mediterranean diet enables us to capture the vibrations, i.e. the changes taking place in contemporary society with which cultural (and dietary) practices must contend.

Marco Romagnoli, Postdoctoral research fellow, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

Remembering Yayoi Kusama: "The Only Method I have Found that Relieved my Illness is to Keep Creating Art"

Portrait of Yayoi Kasuma with pumpkin (2010). Photograph courtesy of Ota Fine Arts Tokyo Singapore Shanghai, Victoria Miro, London, David Swirner, New York. Cover picture of Hermes AW26 in Los Angeles by Max Farago. 

By Sasha Grishin

In the history of the National Gallery of Victoria, their most successful ticketed exhibition did not feature the work of Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet or Pablo Picasso. It was of the late, veteran Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama. Held over the summer months in 2024–25, the Melbourne exhibition attracted 570,537 ticketed visitors.

Yayoi Kusuma in her room at

her parents home in Matsumoto,

circa 1957. Courtesy of Yayoi 

Kusama Studio, Inc.

Kusama’s exhibitions throughout the world have attracted huge crowds. Her infinity mirror rooms, sprawling seas of polka dots, dancing pumpkins and huge expanses of reflective surfaces have become some of the most photographed art objects in human history.

Her art has had a huge impact on many art movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, including pop art, performance art, minimalism, environmental art, video art, fashion, filmmaking and feminism.

A difficult childhood

Kusama was born on March 22 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, to parents who were merchants and operated a plant nursery and seed farm.

She suffered from hallucinations from childhood and by the age of ten had created paintings in watercolours, pastels and oils using polka dot and net motifs that she encountered in her visions.

She described her childhood as traumatic, with a physically abusive mother and a womanising father, and a time when her artistic endeavours were discouraged. She found refuge in her art.

Her childhood was overshadowed by World War II. By the time she was 13, she was sewing parachutes for Japanese soldiers and was aware of American bombers flying overhead and of constant air-raid sirens. She attended Arigasaki High School and, in 1948, studied Nihonga painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts.

By 1950, Kusama was exhibiting in Japan, to some acclaim, her sprawling paintings, mainly on paper, of abstracted natural forms and would cover all surfaces – floors, walls, ceilings and naked assistants with polka dots that she would term “infinity nets”.

Concerning her painting, Flower (D.S.P.S), 1954, she wrote:

One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows, and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space and be reduced to nothingness.

The heart of the art scene

In 1957, Yayoi Kusama travelled to the United States and settled in New York. She was at the heart of the American post-war art movement where she exhibited to considerable applause large paintings, soft sculptures and environmental sculptures using mirrors and electric lights.

In the 1960s, she staged many happenings, such as body painting festivals, fashion shows and anti-war demonstrations.

It has been argued that her work had a profound impact on artists, including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol.

She was also involved in film productions and newspaper publication.

In 1968, the film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, that Kusama produced and in which she played the leading role, won a prize at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium and the Second Maryland Film Festival and the second prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

She held exhibitions and staged happenings in various countries in Europe and participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966, where she exhibited her Narcissus Garden comprising of hundreds of mirrored spheres.

(Narcissus Garden entered the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in 2024, in its new iteration of 1,400 stainless steel balls, each 30cm in diameter.)

The artist’s physical and mental health deteriorated while she was in America and she attempted suicide.

For her, her art was the path to salvation.

A return to Japan

Kusama returned to Japan to live there permanently in 1973.

After experiencing a further suicide attempt, in 1977 she admitted herself into the Tokyo psychiatric institute, the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, from which she was never discharged.

She lived in the hospital and made daily excursions to her studio where she maintained a frenetic pace of work.

Yayoi Kusama was one of the most acclaimed artists of her time. A major retrospective exhibition of her work held in 1998 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

There were also major retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York, and Tate Modern, London, in 2012, and at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC in 2017. In 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo.

Commercially, her work achieved record prices and she has received various awards for her novels, poetry and films.

In an interview with Infinity Net in 2012, Yayoi Kusama said:

I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.

Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

How Tom Stoppard Made Us All Philosophers: ‘It’s Wanting to Know that Makes Us Matter’

British playwright Tom Stoppard assumed his audience was as well read and inquisitive as he was. Photograph/ALAMY. Cover picture of Issey Miyake SS26 in Paris by Jay Zoo for DAM.

By Fergus Edwards

Tom Stoppard was one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful playwrights of our age. He won his first Tony Award for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968, and his last for Leopoldstadt in 2023.

Stoppard directing the film adaptation of his play

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1990. 

His life was extraordinary. Born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, his Jewish family fled Nazi occupation to India and then England. 

He chose to become a journalist rather than go to university, and became close friends with Nobel Prize winners, presidents – and Mick Jagger.

The wit and intellectual curiosity of Stoppard’s plays was so distinctive that “Stoppardian” entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. Hermione Lee’s biography of him contains a cartoon with annoyed audience members hissing: “Look at the Jones’s pretending to get all the jokes in a Stoppard play.”

Stoppard just assumed his audience was as well read and inquisitive as he was.

Philosophy is the foundation

As Stoppard said to American theatre critic Mel Gussow in 1974,

most of the propositions I’m interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition that would occur to any intelligent person in his bath.

Philosophy is the foundation of Stoppard’s plays. They cite Aquinas, Aristotle, Ayer, Bentham, Kant, Moore, Plato, Ramsey, Russell, Ryle and Zeno. One philosopher in Stoppard’s radio play Darkside (2013) is never sure if he is spelling Nietzsche correctly.

In 2003, the actor Simon Russell-Beale recalled to a National Theatre audience Stoppard introducing a cast to

2,000 years of philosophy in an hour – it was rather brilliant – just to explain what the debate was and why it was dramatically exciting.

Philosophy – but not before life

Stoppard’s interest in philosophy began in 1968. He wrote to a friend that he was

in a ridiculous philosophy\logic\math kick. I don’t know how I got into it, but you should see me […] following Wittgenstein through Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The Austro-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) had a philosophy of philosophy. He argued lots of academic philosophy was literal nonsense. Some things we think are important are beyond words.

Stoppard saw theatre similarly, saying in a lecture to Canadian students in 1988 that “theatre is a curious equation in which language is merely one of the components”.

Stoppard as a young playwright in 1972. Clive Barda/Radio Times/Getty Images

Stoppard wrote philosophers who tie themselves into cerebral knots failing to prove what they want to believe about God, morals or consciousness in plays such as Jumpers (1972), Rock ‘n’ Roll (2006) and The Hard Problem (2015).

One of Stoppard’s philosophers dictates a lecture in Jumpers, saying “to begin at the beginning: is God? (To SECRETARY). Leave a space”.

Stoppard’s plays sympathise with this forlorn desire to know until it leads characters to ignore other people. Action in the world is more important than the search for knowledge if there is a marriage to be saved, a dying wife to be cared for, or an adopted child to be found. Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics is complex – but Stoppard’s plays show it in effect.

What we know, and how

In his TV play Professional Foul (1977), Stoppard sent philosophers to a conference in Prague. Scholarly debate was contained by totalitarian censorship. The professor of ethics at Cambridge University makes his call for action by riffing on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we are by no means silent.”

Stoppard also staged lines from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979). Some characters speak English, others use the same words but with different meanings. The audience observes and learns this new nonsense language, laughing at its jokes. They understand the philosophy of language as Wittgenstein did: social conventions between people, not words pinned on things.

What we can know, and how, is crucial to Stoppard’s plays even when the immediate subject matter isn’t philosophy.

It might be quantum physics in Hapgood (1988) or chaos theory in Arcadia (1993); European history in The Coast of Utopia (2002) or contemporary politics in Rock ‘n’ Roll; individual consciousness in The Hard Problem or even whatever we might mean by “love” in The Real Thing (1982). The characters really do want to know. They debate and interrogate but never find definite answers.

As Hannah suggests in Arcadia:

It’s all trivial […] Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.

But there are jokes too. Arcadia opens in 1809 with a precocious 13-year-old girl asking her dashing 22-year-old tutor: “Septimus, what is carnal embrace?” before the tutor (originally played by a smoldering Rufus Sewell) pauses, and cautiously replies “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef”.

The audience erupted in laughter. I was one of them.

And as the play draws to a close, a waltz in 1809 happens in the same room as a waltz in the present. As the two dancing couples circle each other, Stoppard’s play suggests that what one person can share with another is more meaningful than justified true belief.

It is a beautiful, theatrical moment. And it is beyond words.

Fergus Edwards, Lecturer in English, University of Tasmania

The Shards Transforms Bret Easton Ellis’s 1980s LA Nightmare into a Warning for the Present

Igby Rigby as Bret and Kaia Gerber as Susan in a scene from the series thriller The Shards, set in 1981 Los Angeles following an elite group of prep school students. 

By Bran Nicol

Ryan Murphy, director of the controversial Netflix true-crime Monster Anthology (2022-), and Bret Easton Ellis, literary provocateur and author of American Psycho (1991), seem the perfect match. Sure enough, Murphy’s new TV adaptation of Ellis’s 2023 novel, The Shards, for Disney+ is an exhilarating mix of teen drama, serial killer nail-biter and homoerotic cat-and-mouse thriller.

The Shards features a fictionalised version of Ellis himself (a standout performance by Igby Rigney). The show details the unravelling of a close-knit group of friends during their senior year at a private LA high school in 1981. It’s triggered by the simultaneous arrival of a charismatic and mysterious newcomer, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere, son of Richard Gere), and the terror and destruction wrought by a serial killer at large in the community dubbed “the Trawler”. Are these events coincidental? Or connected in some way?

Ellis has said that the appeal of his precocious first novel, Less Than Zero (1985) (which he was indeed working on in his senior year, as the series shows) was that it allowed viewers to imagine what it would be like to be a privileged youngster in cool, affluent Beverley Hills.

The trailer for The Shards.

This TV incarnation of The Shards presents a particularly vivid version of this fantasy. The affluent teenagers pad around beautiful, empty houses, throw endless pool parties, drive through LA in their shiny cars and indulge in as much drugs and sex as they want.

Yet the flip-side of such extraordinary freedom is excessive vulnerability. The story of the Trawler recalls the dark history of late 1970s and 1980s LA. It was a time when over 20 serial killers – each given similarly foreboding monikers like the Night Stalker or the Hillside Strangler – were also traversing the city.

Watching the lives of such a privileged group become shattered might be considered just deserts: a secret satisfaction for viewers enamoured by that Beverley Hills fantasy life. This is, after all, the kind of dark morality which propels the slasher movie (a genre which has influenced both Ellis and Murphy) where characters, usually girls, die in seemingly direct proportion to how sexually active they are.

But The Shards wants to do more than glamorise and invite critique of the lives of affluent youth in the US. Outwardly its sumptuous rendering of Westside interiors and exteriors tempt viewers to regard it as another example of TV’s current fascination with displaying the indulgent existences of the super-wealthy, such as Big Little Lies (2017) or White Lotus (2021-).

The Shards aims at something more profound. At its heart is a comparison between 21st-century existence and the world of the early 1980s. The series reminds us that then there were no helicopter parents, no social media nor smartphones. Factors which explain how these teenagers can do what they wish without adult scrutiny.

Despite the permissive atmosphere – as Bret’s comparison of Mallory’s arrival to “a virus” signals subtly – all this sexual decadence was, in only a few years, about to be extinguished by the advent of Aids.

Lessons for today

Yet The Shards also insists this era is the gateway to understanding the world we exist in now. This is a core message of the novel, conveyed powerfully through references to songs from the period.

Ellis’s fiction has always used music as a way of summing up character or anchoring its narrative in a particular cultural moment. In The Shards, his observations about emblematic music tracks of the time – such as Ultravox’s Vienna or Kim Wilde’s video for Kids in America – focus on what he calls a pervasive social “numbness”.

The novel’s virtual soundtrack is one reason it feels so deeply personal. In literary terms, The Shards is what is known as an autofiction. It’s a mode of writing which differs from straight autobiography. Autofiction conveys personal truth in a way which keeps it unverifiable or obscure, perhaps even to the authors themselves.

Like Ellis’s Lunar Park (2006), another magnificent autofiction, The Shards seems an effort to understand which dark parts of his psyche could have summoned up a creation like Patrick Bateman, the psychopathic anti-hero of American Psycho.

Kids in America by Kim Wilde.

Murphy’s adaptation of The Shards – as expected given Ellis’s close involvement as executive producer and co-writer – preserves much of this personal significance. This helps to elevate it above racy, entertaining but essentially empty, bonkbuster thrillers such as Hunting Wives (2025). It is hard, for example, not to see the casting of newcomer Gere, who plays Robert Mallory with a perfect combination of beauty and menace, in the light of Ellis’s notes about the elemental impression the work of his father, Richard Gere, left on his own formative years.

Ellis’s novel is remarkable for how it creates such a deeply immersive blend of image, narrative and soundtrack in prose. The tools available to screen directors ensure they can do this much more easily, as Murphy’s version of The Shards demonstrates. But the pairing of director and writer ensures the series also, just about, avoids the superficial trap TV can fall into – the lingering on surfaces, the indulgence in sex scenes or gruesome murders. It preserves the powerful elements of autofiction and cultural analysis that drive the original work.

Bran Nicol, Professor of English, University of Surrey

They are Content Creators with Thousands of Adoring Fans - So Why do they Feel so Terrible?

The pursuit of fame for fame’s sake has become almost banal in the attention economy and the strange oppressiveness of collective adulation is becoming far more ubiquitous and insidious.

By Julianna Pillemer

If given the chance to gain thousands of admirers for your work, would you take it? The artists who my colleagues and I interviewed as part of our research on content creators did – and many went on to question whether it was worth it.

Mark, an illustrator with millions of followers, revealed a deep sense of dread about what was once his dream: to make a living creating art and sharing it online. (We used pseudonyms to protect the privacy of the people we interviewed.)

“The thing that I got right, that I loved for the longest time and now has almost become the bane of my existence, is creating relatable comics,” he told us. “Now, I’m stuck … I would rather die than make relatable comics, but I’ve built an empire of relatable comics. So what the (heck) am I supposed to do with my life?”

Ironically, the very thing that Mark felt he needed to fulfill his dream – a large, admiring audience for his illustrations – began to feel like a prison. No longer a distant or abstract entity, he now felt inextricably linked to his followers and their reactions to his work.

As an organizational psychologist, I’m convinced that Mark’s existential angst is not unique, nor is it relegated to content creators. Rather, it has profound implications for anyone who cares about the future of work.

Although the strange oppressiveness of collective adulation isn’t new, it is becoming far more ubiquitous – and insidious – in the attention economy.

A ‘chamber of despair’

The pursuit of fame for fame’s sake has become an almost banal pursuit in the attention economy. Content creation is, according to some estimates, a US$300 billion industry. Goldman Sachs projects it to grow to half a trillion dollars within the next few years.

Becoming a content creator has officially elbowed out old standbys like doctor and astronaut as the job that Gen Z and Gen Alpha most aspire to have. Countless online courses now promise to teach the ropes of content creation, while Arizona State University will be offering a new content creation major.

And yet, the realization of this goal often comes with unanticipated psychological costs.

The 54 creators we interviewed as part of our multiyear research project – visual artists and musicians with massive online followings – repeatedly described the unrelenting sense they had of being oppressed or restricted by their audiences, using phrases that involved contorting themselves into two-dimensional versions of themselves.

One artist bemoaned that she had to “flatten and suppress her real self” to engage her audience. An illustrator revealed that she had felt like a “crumpled-up ball of paper” for years. An otherwise chipper cartoonist likened her audience to a “chamber of despair” that nobody else understands.

Over time, we came to think of this condition as “audience entanglement.” It’s a state in which creators become so psychologically intertwined with their followers that the audience begins shaping not just what they make – a phenomenon that has been referred to as “audience capture” – but also the meaning they derive from their work and how they understand themselves.

Audience entanglement plagued creators from all walks of life, regardless of age, gender or nationality. It struck musicians and illustrators, YouTubers and Instagrammers, self-proclaimed anxious wrecks and the freest of spirits. No single personality type or demographic was immune to the experience of a deep enmeshment with one’s audience, and to its profound consequences for their creativity and well-being.

Suffocated by a pressure to perform

Becoming entangled with one’s audience meant that followers’ reactions – whether positive or negative – often started to feel like a burden.

Creators described feeling hypersensitive to how their posts performed, and spending more and more time each day monitoring them.

Then there were the comments. As Selena, an illustrator, put it, a single mean message “would ruin” their week. While they recognized that they needed an audience to do the work they loved, managing it began to feel like a job in and of itself – and not one they signed up for.

At their lowest points, the creators we spoke to were not disrupted merely by the errant hostile comment. They described being unable to take in even the most effusive messages from their audience – the types of affirmations that had initially pushed them to begin creating in the first place.

An adoring audience can be both a reward and a burden. Golden Sikorka/iStock via Getty Images

One wildly successful creator, Maya, recalled receiving direct messages from fans that her art was the only thing getting them through death, divorce and other catastrophic life events. Maya experienced this profoundly positive feedback as being harder to handle than critique:

“I didn’t know how to really hold people’s pain in a meaningful way, and I was also getting really deep criticism – and, in a way, I could almost deal with that better than praise. It’s just a lot for a person to take on.”

As a result, many creators began to view this creative path they had once wanted more than anything as totally unsustainable. There was a tragic irony to this pain. The very thing that made their creative work possible – a large, mostly admiring audience – was also its biggest threat. The audience that allowed them to monetize their creations in the first place had now led to creative paralysis.

Healthy boundaries, intentional engagement

Not everyone we spoke to remained forever imprisoned by their so-called fans. For some, the intense enmeshment they experienced eventually morphed into something healthier.

The creators who shifted toward this dynamic did not stop caring about their audiences. Instead, they learned to develop clear boundaries around audience interactions and clarity on who they wanted to be online – what we called “entanglement management strategies.” By limiting time and energy engaging with the platform, they were able to escape the prison of their fans and once again find meaning and a sense of authenticity online.

As Charlie, an illustrator, explained:

“There is something about hitting this true internal place where, it’s kind of a mystical thing, but some balance between being yourself internally and being yourself externally. There’s some sweet spot there where you know what your audience is and what they expect, and you know where you as a person or creative person overlaps.”

Having spent the better part of two decades researching the psychology of work, I believe that audience entanglement doesn’t just happen to full-time influencers.

The ability to cultivate and manage an online audience has become an essential skill in more traditional professions, like journalism, politics and higher education, with large followings sometimes becoming a prerequisite for, versus a consequence of, success.

Most people will never have a thousand – let alone millions – of followers. But they’ve probably felt some hints of audience entanglement in their relatively banal online lives: the addictive siren’s call of rechecking a post as the “likes” roll in, or an idyllic afternoon with your kid ruined by a snarky comment from an internet stranger.

While countless influencers offer tips for growing online audiences, little training exists for how to actually deal with managing the stress of having large followings.

Previously, only the truly famous – actors, rock stars, pro athletes – were at risk of experiencing the anxiety of public scrutiny.

Now, many of us are just one viral post away from its grasp.

Julianna Pillemer, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, New York University

David Hockney’s Success is a Testament to a Britain that Supported Working Class Artists – the Same Cannot be Said Today

David Hockney working in his London studio in Powis Terrace, Notting Hill. Photograph: Bob Collins, bromide fibre print, 1972. National Portrait Gallery, London. 

By Gregory Salter 

David Hockney was perhaps the most successful and well-known British artist of his lifetime.His exhibitions, from career-spanning shows like David Hockney 25 at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2025) to his groundbreaking touring immersive exhibition David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) (2025), drew thousands of visitors.

David Hockney's 'Portrait of an Artist

(Pool with Two Figures)', 1972 that sold

for $90.3 million at auction in 2018.

His paintings broke sales records. Take his Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972, which became the most expensive painting by a living artist sold at auction after fetching US$90.3 million (£70.3 million) at Christie’s in New York in 2018.

Such success stands in stark contrast to his more humble beginnings. Born in Bradford into a working-class family in 1937, he came of age in a post-war era where access to education and to culture in Britain began to broaden. Through policies and schemes, previously unheard-of opportunities for people of his background began to open up, without which he would not have become the success he is considered today. The situation today for aspiring artists from a similar background is much starker.

A hopeful place for working-class artists

After leaving school at 16, Hockney studied at Bradford School of Art between 1953 and 1957. He had a brief gap of two years working as a hospital orderly due the national service requirement at the time and being a conscientious objector. He then took up a place at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. He benefited from the expansion of universities and art schools in this period, and the availability of means-tested grants for fees and living costs.

In 2026, the affordability of higher education for young people in Britain has been under the spotlight – with warning the situation will get worse, especially for working-class students. More and more students cannot afford to move away to study or take up further education opportunities, as Hockney did. Creative higher education institutions have also seen cuts to funding of around 50%, and it has been proposed that creative degrees will not be covered by the reintroduction of maintenance grants from 2028.

In the early part of his studies at the RCA, Hockney produced paintings like 1960s Going to Be a Queen for Tonight. Such paintings demonstrate the captivating, intoxicating possibilities that the RCA and London more widely offered for a young, gay, working-class artist.

Hockney’s London was accessible and cheap. He lived in a room in Earl’s Court and had about £100 a term from a scholarship. “You could do exactly what you wanted,” he recounted in an interview with the RCA about his time there. “You could even smoke. I remember having to sandpaper off the nicotine stains on my fingers before going to visit the registrar to borrow some money. They couldn’t be seen to be lending to fellows that smoked … Most of us were living on scholarships.”

The escalating cost of living means that for students today maintenance loans often fall short of actual living expenses (like rent and food). Affordability of university is an increasing concern for many and more than two-thirds of full-time students have jobs to help supplement their loans and grants.

At the RCA, Hockney was able to experiment with printmaking for the first time, as the graphics department provided materials for students for free. He quickly flourished in this medium, winning a prize of £100 for an early etching titled, Three Kings and a Queen. For a young artist with no money, this prize was significant. He was able to spend the summer of 1961 not working and afford a plane ticket to New York.

Such desire to experiment would come to define his prolific career as he relentlessly moved between mediums, exploring the possibility of expression through theatrical design, photocollage and eventually digital creation. In 2026, most art students are expected to purchase their own materials so their ability to experiment and discover can be more limited.

Hockney’s trip to New York produced his series of etchings A Rake’s Progress (1961 1963). It was inspired by a print series produced by William Hogarth, published in 1735, that depicts the rise and fall of a young man who inherits wealth then squanders it in 18th-century London.

Hockney adapted Hogarth’s narrative to his own encounter with New York, working in some biographical elements like his decision to dye his hair blonde while he was there. The series is a humorous and earnest reflection on the new possibilities and changes arising for a working-class man from the north of England.

A helping hand

Alongside free education, additional help from prizes and a cheaper cost of living, Hockney’s early career was also supported by the art dealer John Kasmin. Kasmin bought Hockney’s work while he was still at the RCA, and made Hockney part of his stable of artists at his gallery, which opened in London in 1963.

Kasmin helped Hockney sell his paintings to the right kinds of buyers, but also provided him with a steady income and opportunity for further travel to the US. It was in America that he produced the paintings of Los Angeles for which he remains best known. Here, Hockney’s celebrity and market value were managed while allowing him to work as he wished.

My Parents. Tate., CC BY-NC-ND

Hockney’s early experiences are in contrast to the more exploitative flipping of works by young artists by buyers in recent years. There is evidence that this practice, involving buying art by young artists then quickly reselling them for a large profit, has a detrimental effect on young artists’ careers.

Later in Hockney’s career, he made a quiet nod to his working-class roots with My Parents (1977). This double portrait of his mother, posing obediently and affectionately for her son, and his father, leafing through an art book, is not only a moving depiction of family, but also a painting about social mobility.

Amid the celebrations of and tributes to Hockney from politicians and the media, we might recognise the role of class and how it shaped his art, and the structures, particularly state-supported art school education, that made success possible for someone like him.

Gregory Salter, Associate Professor in History of Art, Head of Department, University of Birmingham

Calabria: The revamped Hiking Trail Regenerating an Italian Region Blighted by Mafia Stereotypes

The mountain village called Pentedattilo at the start of the trail. Photograph: Polonio Shutterstock.

By Aurora Moxon 

Il Sentiero dell’Inglese – the Trail of the Englishman – is bringing new hope to Calabria’s Aspromonte mountains in southern Italy, one of the EU’s most marginal and economically depressed areas.The six-day trail is named after the English poet Edward Lear who walked these mountains in the 19th century. The route encourages hikers to challenge preconceptions of the Aspromonte and experience local hospitality, while boosting the economy of an area at risk of abandonment.

The Aspromonte has long been associated with the ’Ndrangheta – Italy’s most powerful mafia. In the 1970-1980s, organised criminals held high-profile kidnapping victims in these mountains, consolidating this association. The most famous of these was Jean Paul Getty III, grandson of the oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty Sr, whose kidnapping inspired the 2017 film All the Money in the World.

As well as researching food, farming and ecotourism in the Aspromonte mountains, my work investigates the negative effects of stereotypes of this area.

Although the ’Ndrangheta is still active in Calabria today, much of its primary activity now takes place in Italy’s north and overseas. Despite this shift, a negative image of the Aspromonte and its inhabitants still prevails among Italians.

It was not the ’Ndrangheta, but mountain brigands (robbers) that Lear feared when he set off on foot through the Aspromonte in 1847.

Best known for his poem The Owl and the Pussycat (1871), among Lear’s other works is Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria. Published in 1852, he wrote about the people of the Aspromonte who shared their houses and food with him, from members of the landowning class to the poorest peasants.

Although he often interpreted his surroundings through a northern European lens, exaggerating the presumed backwardness of the area and its inhabitants, Lear was evidently impressed by this hospitality and Aspromonte’s physical  

Boosting the trail

In 2019, a hiking organisation called La Cooperativa San Leo, based in the village of Bova, opened Il Sentiero dell’Inglese. The trail follows the first 80km of Lear’s journey on old mule tracks with views of the Ionian Sea, Mount Etna and the dramatic valleys and peaks of the Aspromonte.

The cooperative runs a network of local B&B hosts across the seven villages along the route. They offer hikers local cuisine in private homes and no-frills eateries, with accommodation for around €60 a night. Now numbers of tourists from Italy’s north and other parts of Europe are on the rise.

Andrea Laurenzano, president of the cooperative and coordinator of the trail, told me that 2024 saw around 600 hikers walk the sentiero while approximately 1000 hikers completed it in 2025. This year has seen approximately 700 people walk it so far. However, despite Lear’s fundamental role in the trail’s story, hikers from the UK are rare.

The trail is becoming a vital economic artery. Locals with B&Bs can join the hosting network and earn a small income during the low-season (hiking is best avoided in the summer heat). It also provides employment for local guides and brings business to bars, restaurants, shops, museums, artisans and farmers.

Antonio Frangipani, local guide and vice-president of the association that runs the trail, explained that the cooperative’s restaurant in Bova uses organic ingredients such as cheeses from local herders and fruit and vegetables from local farmers.

Finding ways to protect and promote the unique agropastoral culture of this part of the Aspromonte, called the Area Grecanica, is important. Ancient rural know-how and the Greco-Calabro language, which includes words and phrases from ancient Greek, are at risk of dying out as inhabitants move away from the local villages. This movement is part of a wider pattern in Italy of human abandonment of inland regions.

The repercussions of the trail go well beyond the purely economic. Human geographers like Tim Edensor argue that walking has historically forged stereotypes, contributing to the marginalisation of cultures considered “other” from a western viewpoint. The bourgeois Lear and his travels across southern Europe arguably fall into this category.

Local guides, however, believe that hiking is helping to challenge negative associations of the Aspromonte. They say that hikers often arrive with varying degrees of prejudice regarding locals and their way of life, and leave with a new appreciation of the region.

Ugo Sergi, trail host, organic bergamot producer and well-known figure on the local ecotourism scene, described his experience to me: “Many people have come here … believing they would find a dangerous and backward underclass. I have taken great pleasure in helping them understand how they were mistaken.”

Similarly, local guide Stefania Praticò explained: “The Sentiero dell’Inglese has started to remove the stigma as people walk these paths [which] help to show these places in a new way. [The trail] creates this connection, they can understand with their own eyes that the [stories] are different from reality.”

Il Sentiero dell’Inglese is demonstrating that a form of slow tourism adapted to the particular culture and problems faced by locals in the Aspromonte is working to regenerate and rehabilitate a once notorious region of southern Italy.