Art often feeds on that which is passing away, and in doing so, assits its passage. In Britian, with its precipate deindustraliaztion , much of tradtional working class culture has now aquired a nostaligc patina, celebrated in the cliches of a film like The Full Monty, in which social collpase is recast as what is meant to be bitter-sweet comedy. Similary in Sensation, there were curse kokes, kebabs, tabloid spreads, figments of pornography, confessional and lurid peices--in short artists trying hard to behave badly . The mere form, the shadow of working-class culutrre, is cleberated but only in the grosses and most cliched outlines (of course its silly for anyone to object, because this art is so knowing, so ironic.) The solidatry that those forms prodced and were produced by is forgotten, and the result has only the appeance of life. So this vampristic art draws life from its already anaemic subject. (233)

Pastoral , says Empson, can give expression to a critique of social injustice, at least in a limited way, since the exceuluded or those who have alittle of no stakje in society has less to risk by relatiing some hume truths about it. Now it has to be said that in Britian art thjat criticises social injustice has been thin on the ground for some years...but nevertheless contrempary pastoral art has conrained a critrique of the way things are, not so much in the wider society, as in the art world. The snobishness, cant and false high seriousness of the art world is at least implicitly criticised by an art that uses the form of high art to relay obsecnties, crudities and the detrius of modern urban life . Such art makred a sharp rejewction of hiugh theory, of the elite and autonomous concerns of art, and of the comventional pities of these artsits beloved byt he art establishment..( 252-3)

High Art Lite, Julian Stallabrass, Verso, 199.