Hogarth’s Progress in Nick Dear’s The Art of Success

This essay focuses on Nick Dear’s "The Art of Success", staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1986. It assesses the pregnancy of Hogarth’s voice in a play that engages vibrantly with today’s cultural issues. These contemporary issues do indeed resonate with those of Hogarth’s age, and, in his one- day compression of events that occurred in the artist’s life between 1727 and 1737, the playwright casts Hogarth as ‘the Warhol of the eighteenth century’, a comparison then taken up in 1989 by the American critic Frank Rich, writing in "The New York Times". As Dear questions the role of the artist in society and discusses the rise of the globalized art market and the political manipulation of aesthetics, it can be argued that his play establishes a close correspondence between Hogarthian times and the 1980s debate on the complex identity of British art – a debate that was to pave the way for the impressive success of Young British Art.