Megan Whelan look at how revolutions shape - and are shaped by - fashion, literature and the visual arts, with Dr David Maskill, Dr Margaret Medlyn and Dr James Meffan.

Does the best creative work emerge in times of strife?

In part three of Great Ideas, Megan Whelan looks at how revolutions shape - and are shaped by - fashion, literature and the visual arts.

Participants: Dr David Maskill, Dr Margaret Medlyn and Dr James Meffan

What is the artist's responsibility in a time of change?

"We all need to be shown what it is to be human," Dr Margaret Medlyn says.

"Equally, for a stand-alone piece of art to break down accepted barriers and conformations of style, is an artist's duty.

"That's why an artist is an artist - to confront society and society's expectations."

Medlyn cites Igor Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' - which caused a riot at its first performance - and Richard Wagner's 'Tristan and Isolde', which she describes as hypnotic, charming and timeless, but also unsettling and as portraying intense human emotion.

Dr David Maskill struggles to think of any other artist who has been as embedded with a revolutionary cause as Jacques-Louis David.

Maskill points to Jacques-Louis David's portrait of the assassination of French revolutionary politician Jean-Paul Marat.

"I think what David was trying to depict was the fundamental shift from a God-centred universe to a human one.

"That this political deputy could actually now be treated as a Christian martyr. And of course, at this precise moment, Christianity was outlawed. They changed the calendar so the birth of Christ was no longer the beginning of the calendar."

"It was an attempt to wipe the slate of history clean."

Revolutions happen in both content and form, Dr James Meffan says.

He mentions the Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author JM Coetzee, who was criticised for not being "accessible".

"Coetzee was going to have none of this. He saw the artist's responsibility to the art per se."

"Someone described - in possibly the most backhanded attack on Coetzee's novel - that what he was offering was a coterie of modernist thinkers in South Africa some kind of masturbatory release."

"While Rome was burning, there were these artists off gazing at their navels," Meffan says.

"That kind of tension endures in many situations, and I think the works of art that endure, pretty reliably, seem to be the ones that have been provocative in their manner of representation as much of what they represent."…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details