Whatever the sources for its current vitality it does not have much to do with an Academy

Whatever the sources for its current vitality, it does not have much to do with an Academy, or tradition, but to the fact that Britain as such had never had a strong aesthetic backbone. The cover of Vision – the Union Flag coloured in bright pastels, rather than the old red, white and blue – seems to represent the diversity of influence that British art has drawn on, turned over, and made into something new.British art is now made by Anish Kapoor, Zaha Hadid and Bjork, as well as by Howard Hodgkin and the Chapman brothers. They still have currency and consequences in real life, but in art anything can happen. If British art seems in a particularly fertile phase lately it is because “British” now embraces much of the rest of the world.”British” rather than English art has been boosted by multi-culturalism and virtually invented by practitioners of no fixed class. That is to say, a wine culture has been ousted by the Coke culture.” Even then, British art, in practice, was not exactly home-grown.It is some indication of how times have moved when definitions based on geography or origins seem almost irrelevant. Vision – a sleek coffee-table book with lots of pictures interspersed with essays – celebrates this aspect of British creativity.The terms “British” and “creativity” have not always combined easily; the tired tread of Empire and the culture it produced took care of that. England – without the assistance of Scotland, Ireland and Wales – starts to look stranded in cultural terms.

Embarrassed by art, chippy about intellectual pursuits, England alone was prone to cower in the face of European sophistication or American boldness, then to invite in whatever it could incorporate.David Sylvester, in his piece “A New-Found Land”, discusses a conflict of influences on British art in the Fifties: “the history of the city over the second half of this century is epitomised by the steady replacement of bistrots by hamburger bars. If this sometimes results in work that seems trite, there is no denying that much also seems genuinely new. Unlike in literature, theatre or even film, the heavy hand of Victorianism is hardly in sight. During the post-war years, the dictates of taste in these more modern arts have been eclipsed by the pursuit of style. VISION: FIFTY YEARS OF BRITISH CREATIVITY

EDITED BY MICHAEL RAEBURN, THAMES & HUDSON, pounds 24.95
MODERNITY IN British art is probably most conspicuous in pop music, visual art and design.

It avoided the well- beaten path; it was a novel approach; and it wasn’t the Oscar everyone thought they knew. So if we keep off the realism and trust our imagination, as Oscar suggested in “The Decay of Lying” 110 years ago, I think his story still has a few years of life in it yet.. The story alone, peppered with crashingly familiar epigrams, is no longer enough.The Judas Kiss, on the other hand, was mostly David Hare thinking his way into Wilde’s mind at two critical points in his life and, in absence of the facts, conjecturing what might have happened. Over here, the details of his trials have been rammed down our throats ad nauseam, so when it opened in the West End we stayed away in droves and it flopped.