A Q&A with Peter Carty.
What made you write Art?
I lived in Hoxton in the early 1990s and met many, many artists there. It was an amazing scene with huge numbers of creative people doing exciting things. Everyone felt we were at the start of an enormous cultural moment — and we were right. You could compare it (albeit loosely) to London in the Swinging Sixties or the Left Bank in Paris during the 1920s.
How did Young British Artists change the art world during that period?
Before then, to get any substantial recognition from the art establishment an artist had to be middle-aged and (to be honest) producing works that often weren’t very exciting. That all changed. Lots of young artists made challenging and innovative work that gained widespread attention and suddenly contemporary art gained a mass public following.
And how did Hoxton and Shoreditch change?
Before the artists arrived it was a dead and deserted area in the evenings and at the weekends. Some of the pubs actually had restricted opening hours because there were so few customers around. Then all at once artists were everywhere and the area became a major focus for creativity in London. In and around all the art there were huge amounts of partying to be had. That’s because artists, on the whole, are fun loving people (unlike writers, who have to spend years and years working away in solitary confinement).
How long did it take you to write the novel?
Writing literary fiction is very time consuming. The novel took the equivalent of four years of full time work to write. This was spread out over a nine year period so that I could support myself with paid employment as a journalist. My day job is writing features and reviews for the Guardian, Independent, Financial Times and other newspapers and magazines.
What was emotional about it for you? And what was challenging?
This was a very exciting period of my life. I have always loved artists and art, and suddenly I was immersed in the most seminal British art scene of the 20th century. I met so many incredible people.
It’s been a challenge to get the balance in the novel right between comedy and tragedy, and between fact and fiction. I haven’t written about real people in the novel, although some of the characters are composites of real people. What I wanted to do was to keep the novel true to the spirit of that fantastical epoch, a time and a place when it seemed that almost anything could happen — and often did. At the same time, the novel is a satire. There’s mockery of gentrification, of the staggering amounts of drugs that were abused, and of the organised crime that went along with that — some of the humour in Art is very dark.
Does your novel have any subtexts?
A lot of the art of that period — in much the same way as now — references contemporary philosophy and critical theory. So I make fun of that too, though not directly. There are subtexts mocking philosophers including Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, though you have to look for them. A chapter in which the protagonist thinks he is turning into a toilet pokes fun at Deleuze & Guattari, as well as at the grandfather of conceptual art, Michel Duchamp.
Have you done anything new or innovative in your novel?
In the same way that contemporary art tries to find new perspectives on reality, I believe I have incorporated one or two conceptual innovations within the novel which other novelists haven’t come up with before. Though no doubt I’ll be shot down on that one.
Do you have any favourite parts of the novel?
I’m too close to it to be able to stand back and pick out particular sections. However, there are a couple of chapters which early readers have latched onto. One is Chapter 13, which contains an encounter with Francis Bacon in his pomp, in the infamous Colony Room club in Soho. The other is, again, Chapter 23, which I’ve been told is one of the best accounts of a bad acid trip in contemporary fiction — a backhanded compliment if ever there was one!
Who influenced this book?
One of my main influences is J. G. Ballard, for his dystopian urban visions — and in many ways what has happened to Hoxton and Shoreditch is dystopian. Behind all the shiny restaurant and shop fronts, it remains a very rundown area full of dilapidated social housing. Even so, young artists can’t afford to live there any more. It’s so sad that many of them have had to leave London altogether — or, indeed, abandon the UK for cities like Lisbon and Leipzig. Meanwhile, at the weekends Hoxton and Shoreditch has turned into a kind of hell — it’s the capital’s lowest common denominator for nightlife, rammed with suburban teenagers.
Another of the influences on Art is F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby is all about a mythical, fleeting 1920s culture of excess with a tragic hero at the heart of it, and with organised crime lurking in the background all the while. There’s an obvious homage to that in Art.
What will readers take away from Art?
Ars longa, vita brevis — this is the tragedy at the novel’s heart. It should be underlined that the best art really does last for a very long time. We are still living with the art and through the art that the Hoxton and Shoreditch scene gave birth to. Over the past three decades it’s been one of the most prominent cultural influences on London, and it has risen to become a formidable driving force behind huge amounts of global art and culture. Who would have thought that could have emerged from all that poverty and craziness enacted in those crumbling old warehouses back then?
Read Chapter 23 from Art here.
