They are ubiquitous at art galleries across the world: the audio guide telling shuffling visitors the full story of what they are looking at and occasionally how they should feel.

In the eyes of Sir Tony Cragg, one of the world’s leading sculptors, they are a “terrible” modern scourge that “mess up” the enjoyment of art. “I think they look sad,” he said. “It is a new world image that I really dislike and distrust intensely.”

Cragg is opening a major exhibition at Castle Howard, one of Britain’s most spectacular stately homes made even more famous by being a location for Brideshead Revisited and Bridgerton.

There are 28 sculptures across the house and gardens – most being seen in the UK for the first time – and there are definitely no audio guides for the exhibition.

“We’re happy,” said Castle Howard’s head curator, Christopher Ridgway. “We don’t want to be overly prescriptive.”

In Cragg’s eyes, audio guides spoil the experience of looking at art. “The way I have met art and become engaged with it is just standing in front of an artwork and having my own experience. That is what is so fantastic about looking at stuff.

“To have things formatted with the opinion of someone else … why? Why do that?

“When you come to an artwork you come to it with the sum of your education, your personality, your upbringing, your life experiences and you find in an artwork your relationship to those things.

“You don’t want anyone else interfering in it. I think it relativises the experience of the artwork.”

Cragg said he yearned for the days when “you would just walk into a gallery and there is whatever there is, Carl Andre and his bricks on the floor, say, and you just had to come to terms with it”.

He is fine with labels, as long as they stick to just the title, artist and materials. “That doesn’t mess up people’s experiences,” he said. “But not what the artist thought. Who cares what the artist thought?

“Do you listen to music and someone explains what you’re listening to? That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Do you read another book about the book you’ve read? You read poetry because it’s poetry, not because someone is going to explain it to you.”

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There are no exhibition audio guides at the new show, the first contemporary sculpture exhibition at the North Yorkshire estate.

Instead, visitors will have to decide for themselves how they feel about the glass bottles, vases and glasses precariously piled up in the Vanbrugh-designed Temple of the Four Winds.

It is a magical place. For some, it’s famous as Charles and Sebastian’s wine-tasting spot in the 1981 film Brideshead Revisited, the place they got drunk. For others it could be where Simon and Daphne got fruity on their honeymoon in Bridgerton.

Elsewhere on the estate there is a magnificent plinth in the middle of a small reservoir, which has had nothing placed on it since it was built in the late 18th century. Now it has a 5-metre-wide yellow-gold sculpture titled Over the Earth (2015).

Made from fibre-glass, it looks as if it should be outside the headquarters of a futuristic, probably evil world corporation. Or it could be relaxing, reminding people of floating clouds.

The point, says Cragg, is that we, the visitors, decide what we are looking at and how we feel.

Liverpool-born Cragg, 75, has been based in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977 and has a formidable international reputation. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and his public sculptures can be found all over the world, whether outside the Bundestag building in Berlin or in the countryside near Consett in County Durham, an unexpected and brilliant surprise for cyclists going coast to coast.

Nicholas Howard, whose family has owned Castle Howard since it was built in 1699, said Cragg was the perfect person to begin “a new era of contemporary art” at the estate. “Having now lived with the works for a few weeks, it really feels as if they belong here,” he said.

“With his amazing eye Tony has placed the pieces so they don’t feel like interventions, but more something that has grown up organically.”

Cragg has strong views on the commodification of art, with audio guides being one terrible aspect of that. “My voice isn’t alone on this,” he said. “You hear it among artists and even among visitors – they don’t want it any more. It puts people off.

“But I do think it’s just a phase and we’ll get through it and we’ll grow up.”

• Tony Cragg at Castle Howard opens on 3 May and runs until 22 September.

The months-long standoff between Universal Music Group and TikTok over royalty payments and AI policies is finally over, at least for the time being, with the announcement that the two entities have struck a deal to bring the label’s music back on the platform.

As part of the agreement, the companies stated that they will “deliver improved remuneration for UMG’s songwriters and artists, new promotional and engagement opportunities for their recordings and songs and industry-leading protections with respect to generative AI.”

UMG’s music will return to the platform imminently, and the companies will collaborate on realizing “new monetization opportunities utilizing TikTok’s growing e-commerce capabilities and will work together on campaigns supporting UMG’s artists across genres and territories globally.”

“This new chapter in our relationship with TikTok focuses on the value of music, the primacy of human artistry and the welfare of the creative community,” said Lucian Grainge, chairman and CEO of UMG. “We look forward to collaborating with the team at TikTok to further the interests of our artists and songwriters and drive innovation in fan engagement while advancing social music monetization.”

Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, added, “Music is an integral part of the TikTok ecosystem and we are pleased to have found a path forward with Universal Music Group. We are committed to working together to drive value, discovery and promotion for all of UMG’s amazing artists and songwriters, and deepen their ability to grow, connect and engage with the TikTok community.”

Beginning in February, the ban resulted in a near-complete blackout of all music owned, distributed and published by the company on the platform — the videos were still there, but the music was muted — although there was no shortage of artists breaking the ban, both officially (Taylor Swift, in an apparently UMG-sanctioned promotion around her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department”) and unofficially (plenty of others). While UMG’s reasons for the ban were indisputably high-minded — an attempt to fight for greater compensation and intellectual-property protections for its artists and, of course, to protect its own interests — there is no question that it caused significant disruption in countless artists’ careers.

For the past five years, TikTok has been the single most influential music-discovery and promotion vehicle, and music companies have badgered their artists to become active or “viral” on the platform, leading some to spend their own money in an effort to do so. But beginning in February, UMG artists suddenly found those efforts muted by their own company. A month later, songs with writers signed to Universal’s publishing division faced a similar fate.

The UMG ban seemed to have little substantive effect on TikTok, apart from some bad press, but of course the company now has much bigger fish to fry: Legislation, signed into law on April 24 by President Biden, that will ban the app in the U.S. unless Bytedance, its Chinese parent company, divests its ownership stake. TikTok says it plans to file a lawsuit challenging the new U.S. law on First Amendment grounds. If that fails, the app could become outlawed in the U.S. as early as January 2025. It seems likely that the combinations of the bigger struggle on TikTok’s horizon, and unsteady support for UMG’s move (not to mention its apparent exception for Swift) led both companies to cut their losses and stand down.  

UMG addressed the situation broadly in the letter to artists it issued on Jan. 30 informing them of the impending ban. “TikTok makes little effort to deal with the vast amounts of content on its platform that infringe our artists’ music and it has offered no meaningful solutions to the rising tide of content adjacency issues, let alone the tidal wave of hate speech, bigotry, bullying and harassment on the platform,” it reads in part. “The only means available to seek the removal of infringing or problematic content (such as pornographic deepfakes of artists) is through the monumentally cumbersome and inefficient process which equates to the digital equivalent of ‘Whack-a-Mole.’ … We will always fight for our artists and songwriters and stand up for the creative and commercial value of music.”

The ban was difficult to enforce anyway: Unlike streaming services, rights-holders — usually record labels — are not the only entities who can upload music to the platform; virtually anyone can, and since the app is controlled by TikTok, labels and other rights-holders cannot do anything about infractions except issue takedown notices and other legal notifications. Also, TikTok’s detection software can be eluded by some sped-up, slowed-down or otherwise altered songs, which many users do when including music in their posts. There is also the possibility that some involved parties turned a blind eye to some infractions.

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Riya Teotia

Riya is a sub-editor at WION and a passionate storyteller who creates impactful and detailed stories through her articles. She likes to write on defence tech

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