Brexit in popular culture

Brexit is the commonly used term for the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union on 31 January 2020, which resulted from a referendum on 23 June 2016. This article details the mostly critical response to this decision in the visual art, novels, theatre, and film.

Background

The British government led by David Cameron held a referendum on the issue in 2016; a majority voted to leave the European Union. On 29 March 2017, Theresa May's administration invoked Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union in a letter to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk. The UK was set to leave on 29 March 2019, unless the Brexit Withdrawal agreement was adopted by the House of Commons, in which case the UK would have left in May 2019. With the failure to ratify the withdrawal agreement by the British Parliament, Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated a further extension until 31 October 2019. Later that year the withdrawal was delayed a further 3 months and, struggling to pass his renegotiated deal in the way he wished, Prime Minister Boris Johnson called the 2019 general election on 12 December 2019. The election resulted in the Conservatives receiving a majority of 80 seats; the UK subsequently left the European Union at 23:00 GMT on 31 January 2020.

Artists' sentiments toward Brexit

The response of artists and writers to Brexit has tended to be negative, reflecting a reported overwhelming percentage of people involved in Britain's creative industries voting against leaving the European Union. The visual artist Bob and Roberta Smith, writing in The Guardian newspaper during 2017, typifies this response:

Post-Brexit, we face a dissolution of our museums and galleries comparable in its devastation to that visited on England in the 1530s, as philistine politicians slash budgets.