Border crossing: Grayson Perry’s queerly utopian English journey

In 2012, British contemporary artist Grayson Perry undertook a journey from Sunderland in northern England to the Cotswolds in the south. His stated aim was to explore the relationship between class and taste in twenty-first-century Britain. This journey was screened on the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 as a three-part documentary entitled All in the Best Possible Taste. Throughout his journey, Perry uses his observations and interactions with those he meets to produce a series of six large tapestries, The Vanity of Small Differences (2012). These tapestries, inspired by Hogarth’s series of paintings entitled A Rake’s Progress (1733), trace the meteoric rise, and tragic fall, of a fictional character Tim Rakewell, whose ascension through the social ranks ends in a rather violent death (this narrative echoes that of Hogarth’s equally fictional Tom Rakewell). In my article, I analyse Perry’s documentary, and in particular the artwork, which he produces as a part of that documentary, using concepts borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Michel Maffesoli and Louis Marin, among others. I argue that Perry’s purported exploration of the relationship between British (or rather English) class and taste is in fact primarily concerned with two other things: first, Perry’s own status as a contemporary artist – a desire to portray himself as a ‘latter-day Hogarth’, if you will; and second, contemporary art’s capacity to be both relevant to society and popular among members of that society. Ultimately then, via his performative exploration of subjectivity in this documentary and indeed elsewhere in his work, Perry ‘queers’ not just masculinity, but also, and perhaps more importantly, received notions of national, social and artistic identity.

A Rake’s Progress

This case discusses a middle-aged male who experiences abdominal pain and loss of consciousness at a mall. His wife believes he is having a heart attack and rushes him to a nearby emergency department. He is also experiencing some left shoulder pain and diaphoresis, which is misinterpreted at triage. This communication error leads to him being misassigned to a cardiac area. Eventually, the correct diagnosis is made, and the patient makes an uneventful recovery.

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo: Bloodhound and animalist

The purpose of this paper is to study the 18th century’s sources of Une éducation libertine by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo. This immersive novel showcases a young man initiation story as a rake’s progress. Our transartistic and transtextual approach will allow us to explain the Del Amo storyworld and founts. We focus, in particular, on the daily life in Paris in 1760 (Paris, professions, money, food, cafés, theaters…), in some clichés of the 18th century (justice, sexuality, religion, ‘libertinage’…), the symbolic world of Del Amo and his onomastic exploration. We expose this approach in order to prove that this novel is a tribute to the 18th century but also to evidence that is a masterpiece of the 21th century.

The Faustian and Mephistophelean Worlds in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress

Created by Igor Stravinsky, in collaboration with W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, the Faustian opera The Rake’s Progress (1947–51) was inspired by a series of engravings by William Hogarth. The collaboration between Stravinsky and Auden is a fascinating study, not only because of the way in which these luminaries interacted to produce this masterwork, but also because it provides insights into Stravinsky’s compositional process for his first dramatic work that involved the setting of a text in English. This chapter provides a glimpse into the process for specific musical passages in The Rake’s Progress and considers certain parallels between the storyline of Auden’s text and that of Goethe’s Faust.