Saying that artists in the UK are the result of ‘British creativity’, rather than an international, cross-pollinated culture, is like calling a lightbulb a generator, says Tom McCarthy.
Art does not take place in a vacuum. It maintains an ineradicable, if often troubled, relation to power. Renaissance painters understood this, and allegorised it in their canvases, which often recast in a mythical light the systems of patronage that had occasioned them in the first place. So did 20th-century dramatists. Both Yeats and Brian Friel wrote plays featuring court scribes tasked not only with recording political events... Keep reading on The Guardian
Art does not take place in a vacuum. It maintains an ineradicable, if often troubled, relation to power. Renaissance painters understood this, and allegorised it in their canvases, which often recast in a mythical light the systems of patronage that had occasioned them in the first place. So did 20th-century dramatists. Both Yeats and Brian Friel wrote plays featuring court scribes tasked not only with recording political events... Keep reading on The Guardian