Hogarth’s Progress in Nick Dear’s "The Art of Success" (1987)

My paper is one of the many chapters of Hogarth’s largely uncharted afterlife. It will focus on Nick Dear’s "The Art of Success", staged at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1986, and it will investigate to what extent Hogarth is a significant voice in the play and engages vibrantly in today’s cultural issues. Indeed, the twentieth century is in resonance with the Eighteenth century and by compressing in one day events that occurred in his life from 1727 to 1737 the playwright features Hogarth as “the Warhol of the Eighteenth century”, as the American critic Frank Rich reviewed/defined him on The New York Times in 1989. As a matter of fact, I would rather suggests that his questioning the role of the artist in society, the rise of the globalised art market and the political manipulation of art, more than Andy Warhol remind the Eighties’ debate on the need for re-defining a specifically British art and identity – a debate that will lead to the impressive success of Young British Art movement.