Travis Elborough interviews Peter Carty about his novel Art. Art is a dark satire about the birth of Young British Artists in early 1990s Hackney, faithfully reflecting the period and its creative obsessions. Illuminating, moving and blackly funny, it mercilessly exposes the pretensions of contemporary art, as well as the unrestrained hedonism and low life that ran alongside in the streets of Hoxton and Shoreditch. This was a period when organised crime, urban blight and fascism were prominent locally. The novel’s backdrop is the gentrification that the artists helped to kick-start, and which has dramatically transformed the area over the past three decades.