'The moment I saw her work was like a sucker punch to the guts' Bidisha on Nan Goldin

Except that there is no glamour with Nan Goldin. When I finally saw her work, it was a sucker punch to the guts. These pictures were like reportage from the war zone of ordinary life. They had nothing to do with fashion or the slickness of the Mayfair gallery that was hosting the show. The prints - so glossy that they seemed to ooze like syrup - were arranged all over the walls and stuck straight in with pins. There was no glass between the viewer and the work, no frames cutting each photograph off from the next.

It was the first time I'd seen explicit sex that wasn't porn, intimate scenarios that didn't objectify. The first time, too, that transsexuals, drag queens and sex workers were shown not as a tragic joke but depicted with friendship and fragility.

Nan Goldin's photographs are alive because the emotions that prompted her to take them are alive, sympathetic. Consider the famous images from 1986, showing Goldin tussling on a bed with a lover who beat her. We see the effect of the beating, the blood-red eyeball and the stunned, determined expression. The shots are from the sequence called, with signature droll honesty, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Did I share her pain? No. I'm too puritanical and too much of a natural celibate to hanker for the 'passion' of an abusive relationship or the seedy thrill of a major smack habit. It was deeper than that: I admired her. Her work contains every emotion except hate. She showed the effects of Aids - and the warmth of gay relationships - when America reviled homosexuality even more than it does now.

She was deemed controversial because she hit a few nerves that people prefer not to think about: the abuse of women, the hustling of drug addicts, the loneliness of sexual relations. At the same time, she demonstrated in her affectionate photographs of friends that it is love, not pain, which motivates her work. And she does it all with a dexterous, lightly worn technical mastery.

I admire her longevity. She's attained the best kind of success: acclaim and acknowledged influence, without vulgarisation. Twenty years ago, Goldin shot hazy lives with precision. Now her work is looser, happier. She photographs sweet kids; there's a background buzz of fame and wealth. The famous early-career slide-shows still happen, but this time they're at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, accompanied by a John Tavener composition sung by Björk. The lovemaking couples depicted in that piece are so lost in each other that Goldin herself seems to have disappeared, become part of the grain of the light.

The frames are no longer suffused with yearning but with celebration. The Pompidou piece (whose images can be seen in the Phaidon book, The Devil's Playground) made me cry, not only because of the images themselves but because of how far they had come from the lonely beds of the Eighties.

The intimacy of Goldin's work made photo diaries my own fun obsession for years. More important, her beautiful documentary style made me realise that life-writing was my vocation, not literary fiction, that the dramas and raptures of the real world were infinitely more vital than anything my stultified imagination could dredge up. I wanted to write about real things with as much visceral power and elegance as her photographs had - and with as much compassion.

Bidisha's travel memoir, Venetian Masters, is published by Summersdale

'Something primal was on the prowl' Kitty Empire on Kiss's Destroyer

I think I was eight. I came home with a record that no little girl should have wanted, the kind of record that most fathers of young daughters would have refused to buy. We were out shopping in Montreal; it was the late Seventies. My very old-fashioned, fiftysomething father came from another era. As a teenager, he'd fought in the war (on the 'wrong' side, for Italy, on the Russian front). He had emigrated to Canada in the Fifties and worked, for a while, as a lumberjack. His English would always retain an Irish lilt. He was baffled by the ways of little girls, which could actually explain why he let me buy a copy of Destroyer by Kiss.

It was the cover that got me. It showed four made-up ghouls stamping on the rubble of a post-apocalyptic world. The songs were called tantalising things like 'God of Thunder' and 'King of the Night Time World' and 'Detroit Rock City'. At home, we had Beatles albums, which I adored, and plenty more besides: opera, easy listening, Tom Jones. But this bit of monstrous vinyl opened a window on something I hadn't realised existed, something ugly and mesmerising.

Anyone can see now that Kiss were a mediocre glam-rock outfit who posed more of a danger to themselves (hair catching fire, that kind of thing) than Western civilisation. They never really made it in the UK until the Eighties, but in North America, their records were on racks in chain stores, level with the under-10 eyeline.

Kiss's theatrical transgression was so very cartoonish that it's no surprise an eight-year-old would have found them appealing. Masked superheroes and their nemeses filled cartoons and comic books. Back then, most bands wore themed outfits. I had no clue then about the New York Dolls, Alice Cooper (Kiss's two models) or Bowie, or glam rock, or hard rock or Black Sabbath.

So Kiss seemed to me a unique anomaly, so very different from the disco on the radio or the Grease soundtrack. As it turned out, their mephitic shtick worked on all ages, turning Kiss's fantasy world into a multi-platform exercise in merchandising that, even today, few bands can rival. Kiss Kasket, anyone? Kredit Kard?

Then, though, the danger seemed real. Beyond nicey-nicey Canada was somewhere called Detroit, a 'rock city'. Was that it, reduced to rubble? (Iggy and the Stooges, Motown: that knowledge was all in the future.) The word 'destroyer' and the nuclear nihilism on the big, square sleeve now clearly ripples with the experience of a world war and its icy successor. But then, innocent of contexts, it seemed like something primal and powerful was on the prowl, laying waste to everything I knew; that there really was a 'God of thunder' ('and rock'n'roll!'), and it could be Gene Simmons, and that was infinitely more enthralling than mooning over Donny Osmond. These weird guys were kind of (oh, cringe) alluring, well before I knew what desire was. I had strong, inexplicable feelings for Chewbacca, too.

Destroyer was actually an arty album, in its own, clumsy way, thanks to its producer Bob Ezrin (Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd and many more since). I know now that fans then were put off by frou-frou Ezrin confections such as 'Great Expectations' (again, Dickens had yet to register), in which children's choirs and orchestrations accompanied smutty lyrics bragging about Simmons's desirability. God knows what I made of it then; it makes me snigger out loud now.

Fantastically, Destroyer begins with the sound of washing-up. A radio news bulletin reports the death of a rock fan in a head-on collision. Next, you hear the sound of a car door slamming. A car stereo comes on playing - oh, the intertextuality! - an older Kiss track, 'Rock and Roll All Nite'. The real song - 'Detroit...' - finally kicks in, telling the story of a lairy night out that ends in (you guessed it) a car crash. Moral guardians should note: it's actually a cautionary tale about drink-driving. But the boomeranging plot arc, the priapic guitar, the intimation of goings-on past my bedtime... they blew my tiny mind.

And so it was Kiss, I suppose, that laid the foundations for a lifelong bent for music that tries to be scary or uncouth. They led, eventually, to superior hard rock like Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin and to AC/DC, metal and to less cool places like goth. They inadvertently pointed the way to punk, and then on to hardcore; to hip hop, and gangsta rap, and industrial noise and experimental clanging, and the Boredoms and Lightning Bolt and Gallows. My dad is long dead, but I blame the parents.

'I came in halfway and stayed for the next two full performances' Philip French on Singin' in the Rain

In the late Fifties, when Walker Percy began writing his masterly novel The Moviegoer, obsessive involvement with popular cinema was more a subject for guilty confession than serious discussion. His cool, detached narrator, a young stockbroker from a patrician New Orleans family, wrote: 'In the evenings, I usually watch television or go to the movies. Our neighbourhood theatre in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading, "Where Happiness Costs So Little". The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I, too, once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.'

That's more or less the story of my life. Most people, not just film-makers and critics, have a succession of films that act as milestones, landmarks and signposts through their lives. Movies and moviegoing have meant more to me than anything else. Reading Percy's novel was the final act that lifted the burden of guilt from my shoulders, because around the age of 16 I'd become an intellectual snob. In my teens, I'd started to read a lot and thought salvation lay in literature. After seeing Paul Muni in Death of a Salesman in 1949, I believed theatre a superior experience to cinema. Art had to be difficult, complex, demanding, something only an elite could understand, though in a benevolent future everyone would appreciate TS Eliot, Picasso and Stravinsky. After I'd seen my first subtitled movies and read some high-minded, proselytising books, I embraced the cinema as an art form and socially transformative medium. I began treating Hollywood with snooty disdain, while continuing to devour its product. For the next three years, I was a scoffer and patroniser in all senses of those words.

What came to the rescue? Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain, a cheerful musical about the coming of sound to Hollywood. The scales fell from my 18-year-old eyes in a cinema near Peninsula Barracks, Warrington, in June 1952 at the end of my first six weeks of basic training. I'd gone into the army knowing that two years of national service in the company of dumb soldiers - both the working-class other ranks and the middle-class officers - lay between me and the dreaming spires of Oxford up where I belonged. Well, I later came to find that most of my fellow officers in the Parachute Regiment were brighter, more courageous and more modest in their gallantry than I would ever be. And I soon discovered my fellow squaddies, who'd all left school at 15, had a personal confidence, skills and experiences (most especially the laying of bricks and women) I secretly envied. The only thing they respected about me was some misguided backchat to a corporal, my aggression in the boxing ring and helping them write letters home. Of course I couldn't persuade any of them to accompany me to Liverpool to see Kurosawa's Rashomon, the first Japanese picture shown publicly in Britain. Making the lone expedition gave me a great sense of cultural superiority, as did reading The Observer and the New Statesman

On the last day in Warrington, before we were shipped off for further training elsewhere, I was lonely and depressed, blisters on my feet, a shaving rash on my face and itchy discomfort from my ill-fitting battledress. After our final parade, I slipped out of barracks to see Singin' in the Rain, got in halfway through and stayed for the next two full performances. The film hadn't been well received by the London critics, but I thought it the greatest thing I'd ever seen - joyous, witty, life-enhancing. There is a succession of imaginatively staged, beautiful numbers starting with the title song performed behind the opening credits by Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor. The finest is Kelly and Reynolds performing 'You Were Meant for Me' on an empty sound stage, an explicit statement about, and expression of, the cinema's ability to use technology to create romantic magic.

And between the songs the dialogue scintillates. When I left the picture house, I tried to analyse it, explain why it was so good, so modern, even, as I would now say, postmodern. The only thing I disliked was the Malvolio-like humiliation of Jean Hagen, though she was the only member of the cast to be Oscar-nominated. My experience was like that of the solemn Hollywood director in Sullivan's Travels, who rediscovers the miracle of movie comedy while serving on a chain gang.

What happened to me that day was epiphanic, Damascene, though it took me some years and much reading to temper, modify and understand the experience I'd undergone. The process is still going on.

'It sounded radical, strange, wholly new to my ears' Ekow Eshun on 'Planet Rock' by Afrika Bambaataa

In 1982, I heard a song that changed my life. I was 14 years old and the moment was a typical one of adolescent awakening: bored teenage kid lying on his bed staring out of the window when, above the crackle and fizz of the transistor radio, comes a record that tears through the fabric of the known world, announcing the possibility of other dimensions, other galaxies.

The song was 'Planet Rock' by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, the work of a 24-year-old New Yorker whose real name was Kevin Donovan. Like me, Donovan believed that there was more to life than what lay before him. The difference was that while I was languishing in a dull north London suburb, he had grown up in the Bronx, where he'd acquired notoriety as the leader of a street gang named the Black Spades. Following an epiphanal trip to Africa in his teens, he eschewed violence and adopted instead a persona influenced by warrior kings such as Shaka Zulu.

I didn't know anything of Donovan's redemptive arc at the time, but the figure he'd turned himself into held particular resonance for me. As a child born in London of Ghanaian parents, I'd learnt early on that popular views of Africa were terminally limited. It seemed at the time that Africa's most prominent representatives were Kunta Kinte, the noble slave from Roots, and Idi Amin, with his swagger stick and buffoonish bluster. Going to school in my predominantly white suburb meant that I was never far from jokes about savages and spear-chuckers and the occasional, if non-specific, suggestion that I 'go back to where I came from'.

Bambaataa's nod to Africa was wholly different from anything I'd seen before. A greedy appropriator of sounds and styles, he delighted in marrying wholly unconnected influences. As well as taking inspiration from Africa by way of the Bronx, he also borrowed heavily from the flamboyant clothing and cosmological preoccupations of funk musicians like George Clinton and Bootsy Collins. Fitted out in mohican haircut, silver cape and wraparound sunglasses, Bambaataa looked to me - a teenage comic book fan, eager consumer of stories about characters with strange powers and fantastical costumes - like a real-life superhero.

And then there was the music.Composed of urgent, pulsing synthesiser chords overlaid with chanting and rapping, 'Planet Rock' seemed to spring into being wholly formed, with no antecedents, gesturing to a future of steel and silver and intergalactic spacecraft. In fact, since retiring as a gang lord, Bambaataa had built himself a career as one of the first generation of hip hop DJs who were emerging from New York in the late Seventies and early Eighties. So while 'Planet Rock' sounded radical, strange and wholly new to my ears, it was actually culled from some of Bambaataa's favourite records, most notably 'Trans-Europe Express', Kraftwerk's hymn to the German autobahn.

Even now that, years later, I am aware of the original versions of the records sampled on it, 'Planet Rock' still strikes me as a better song than any of its many constituent elements.

Forged in the early days of hip hop's evolution, it was a defining record of the genre's maturation - taking rap music beyond call and response rhymes into high-concept, ambitious soundscapes. And, in the process, it established a new popular art form that allowed the dreams and desires of young, hitherto unregarded African-American kids to be heard across the whole world.

'Planet Rock' suggested that everything in life was mutable. That a teenage miscreant could reimagine himself as an interstellar funklord. That the austere sounds of a German synth band could spark a revolution in New York black culture. And that, ultimately, when it came to plotting your own course into the future, it didn't matter where you were from - what counted most was where you were.

Ekow Eshun is artistic director of the ICA

'It was slow and tense; I was totally gripped' Conrad Shawcross on Andy Goldsworthy

One Christmas morning when I was about five, I was walking with my mum on Hampstead Heath. The heath was covered with snow and the ponds were all frozen over. Seeing this normally green oasis transformed like this was in itself a lasting memory - I don't think there has been a winter as cold as this since, at least that I have witnessed.

At the time, it felt as if we had stumbled across it by chance but I think in retrospect my mum had probably known it was there but wanted to enhance the magic of the encounter for me. On one of the smaller ponds hidden further into the heath was a small crowd of people gathered round a structure of ice supported on a wooden frame of logs and wedges. The ice consisted of the thin, shattered panes mined from one edge of the frozen pond. A man who, years later I discovered to be Andy Goldsworthy, was working on his own to create a freestanding arch of ice. He had created a semi-circle of logs of various sizes on which he had placed the broken sheets of ice like pages of an open book or an expanded concertina. We had arrived just as the last panes were being added to the apex or keystone.

Once the last pieces had been wedged in, he began to remove the supports underneath the arch. This was a slow and tense experience; I was totally gripped as eachsupport was taken away. The extraction of the last log caused the arch to slowly lean, lurch, and then collapse on top of the artist - luckily, he wasn't hurt. The fact it did not work did not matter and, in a way, just further welded into my young consciousness the complex and intertwined forces and physical properties at play.

A few minutes later, he came up to me and took me over to the water's edge, where he picked up a small, flat piece of ice which he then threw with all his might like a skimming stone on to the surface of the frozen pond.

When the piece hit the ice, it seemed to accelerate and shriek across the pond until it hit the other bank. The speed and visual effect was one thing, but the sound it created quite another. The whole pond acted like a huge musical instrument, the entire frozen surface resonating and echoing with the sound of frozen water hurtling over ice.

Conrad Shawcross is a sculptor

'Middlemarch was a wake-up call' Alex Clark on Middlemarch

In truth, in common with most enthusiastic readers who developed and fuelled their habit in adolescence, there are many books that changed my life, and it was the act of reading and the sense of adventure and nourishment that it brought that wrought the change as much as any individual work.

Indeed, when I started reading seriously, my approach to selection was a mixture of chaos, auto-didacticism and dogged obsession. I would scan the shelves of the library until I came across a book by a writer I had gathered, presumably by some sort of cultural osmosis, was 'important' and then I would read their entire body of work, frequently disregarding whether I either understood or enjoyed what I was doing.

On balance, I think this uninformed omnivorousness has stood me in good stead: going willy-nilly from James Joyce (not a clue what Finnegans Wake meant, still haven't) to Barbara Pym (easier, but I could tell she wouldn't change my life) to Rex Warner (and even now, not that many people have read The Aerodrome) is what liking books is all about.

But when I discovered Middlemarch, at the age of 15, it had a profound effect on what I understood a novel could be and how I understood I could relate to it. Until then, novels had been more or less stories that I either 'got' or didn't; Middlemarch seemed less like a story than a way of figuring out what things meant. In fact, it is an exceptionally dense collection of stories, a web, to adopt the recurring metaphor that George Eliot used to depict life in a provincial town in the 1830s. At its centre stand Dorothea Brooke, an earnest young woman who yearns to do good in the world, and Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious and equally idealistic doctor determined to make his mark in Middlemarch.

Eliot had originally conceived of these characters occupying quite separate works of fiction, until she saw that their stories could be integrated into one panoramic portrayal of small-town life, in which they would be joined by numerous other figures: Casaubon, the elderly scholar whom Dorothea marries; Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's cousin, who falls in love with Dorothea; the respectable Vincy family and their errant children; Bulstrode, the deeply religious banker with a secretly sinful past; and the wealthy Peter Featherstone, the contents of whose will are a matter of fevered speculation.

Of all these characters - each of them flawed, engaging, conflicted and confused to different degrees and at different times - it was Dorothea who most captured my imagination. She can sound, in a brief description, a rather unappealing person; a would-be philanthropist frequently caught in moral binds, a woman who eschews wearing jewellery for fear of seeming flamboyant and who rejects an eminently more dashing suitor than Casaubon, whom she marries in part so that she can help him complete his great unfinished work, The Key to All Mythologies. And yet Dorothea reveals herself over and over again as a heroine made of far greater passions than her dutiful exterior suggests and far greater than her counterparts in the romantic novels of the time, a riposte to whom she was partly intended to be.

Not that I had a very sophisticated grasp of the precise arguments about the position of women or of their portrayal in fiction that Dorothea was meant to embody. I was simply entranced by the idea that she was in some way an underdog - not quite pretty enough, too clever for her own good and forced to do all sorts of unpalatable things before she finally got her due (just like me, my teenage self probably thought).

I'm equally sure that I had little idea of the social history that underpinned Middlemarch, which was written at the beginning of the 1870s, but looked back four decades to chart the pace of industrialisation in Britain and the impact it had on its class system. I was a student before I knew anything much about George Eliot, or Marian Evans, and her own struggle with duty and desire. But reading Middlemarch was something of a wake-up call; realising that I could inhabit a vast canvas and poke around in it, thinking about what it might mean and what might happen and how its creator had herself been bewitched by the scope of her material. I also felt pleased to have read such a long novel without being bored.

Virginia Woolf famously described Middlemarch as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people' - irresistible if what you are most trying to be is grown-up. VS Pritchett, perhaps the most astute of critics, praised the novel for its 'imperturbable spaciousness' and that's exactly right; what it gives the reader is a space in which to think - and to feel that thinking is the most important thing you can do.