Hello and welcome to Navara FM. I'm your host, Eleanor Penny.

What we've come to know as the culture wars have generated a lot of heat and very little

light around the questions of how culture has made, who makes it, how we interact with

it, and how history is interpreted and consecrated through the art and culture we produce.

The legacy press has been busy churning out column after swivel-eyed column to complain

that talking about the class, race or gender context of a work of art is at best naive

and unsophisticated and at worst a sensorious act of desecration. All in all it's probably

fair to say that there's a lot of anxiety surrounding questions about the relationship

between the hallowed realms of capital G, great art and systems of power.

Joining me today to delve right into the fray is the author Natalie Ola, whose latest book

class has recently been published in the Look Again series by The Tate. By taking us on an

alternative journey through Turner and Gainsborough by Jacob Epstein and the young British

artists, it invites us to reexamine the connections between art and social class. Natalie, hello and welcome.

Hello. So in your book you introduce it by talking about the way in which bring a class based

analysis to art that's often shrouded in and the mystique, the sort of air of vauntedness,

can be seen as dragging it down into the mortal realm. Could you explain that sort of terrain

that you're entering into a little bit? Yes, I think I was keen to ensure that the book

wasn't dour or dull and I wanted to ensure that it excited people rather than sort of lecturing them

or making it seem as though we had to kind of strip art of all that makes it sort of compelling

and interesting to people. We all have our own personal relationship to works of art and that's

brings us to it and I think that art does have a very powerful role to play in society and I

wouldn't want to be doing anything that would sort of impede that for people or make it more

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