Virginia Woolf said that a woman requires two things if she is to write: money and a room of her own. She identified tranquillity and material comfort as prerequisites for any kind of literary success.

That’s all very well for a writer who spent her life in upper middle-class wealth and with lots of airy rooms to wander through, but plenty of female writers have produced fine work with neither. Think of Sylvia Plath, whose best poetry burst forth when she was severely depressed and isolated in a freezing London flat. More recently, author Maggie O’Farrell spoke of how the chaos and stress of motherhood helped produce her later novels because the sudden lack of time forced her to ruthlessly utilise any rare, quiet moments.

So whilst elegant, wealthy Virginia may have opined on the comforts of quiet rooms and an independent income, other writers simply gritted their teeth and got on with it. Plath didn’t need tranquillity and O’Farrell didn’t need a room of her own: they both wrote in states of turmoil, stress and upheaval, as have countless others throughout the ages.

It can be agreed, then, that serenity doesn’t particularly provoke art and according to Friday’s edition of Artsnight (BBC2) that is certainly the case in Scotland.

Irvine Welsh presented this episode, announcing he was “back on home turf” to see whether the independence referendum has been “a shot in the arm” for Scottish art.

“For art to flourish it needs new blood”, he tell us, and I flinched. New artists? Oh dear. Everyone knows when you go to see Morrissey or David Bowie in concert you don’t want to hear their new songs; we want the fine old classics. So who are these “new” artists Welsh wants us to meet? I was wary.

My disappointment was aggravated with the first “artist” who announced that he smashed the window of an Edinburgh gallery and stole some doormats, and called both of these capers “works of art”. My heart sank; Welsh had kicked off the programme by reminding us Scotland has always punched above its weight in the art world, but is this what the current crop are up to? Breaking windows and stealing are certainly not “works of art” unless you’re an immensely sheltered and privileged little doll-baby and have never experienced either,= and so have the weird luxury of seeing these petty destructive acts as cool and edgy.

But things quickly improved. Welsh’s next guest was a painter, not a pest, although he shared the same iconoclastic attitude by saying he doesn’t need or seek validation from the established galleries.

From this moment on, the programme was a delight to watch, becoming a clamorous celebration of Scottish artistic energy. The team from Neu! Reekie! who host evenings of performance poetry declared: ‘You’re doing something wrong if you don’t get people walking out”. Much of their poetry is recited in Scots, and it requires a great confidence to do this because “the Queen’s English” brands literature with propriety, intelligence and acceptance. It’s how the clever people speak, don’t you know? However, Neu! Reekie! Laugh at that snobbish and redundant idea. Language evolves, they say, and so there can be no such thing as the right and wrong who to spell or pronounce a word.

The Neu! Reekie! gigs, plus Welsh’s novels, are all helping give the Scots language a restored and elevated place: someone is speaking it other than Rab C. Nesbitt, and the indyref unleashed a popular energy which bolsters that.

But while this energy and confidence might be great for Scotland’s artists and writers, what about the rest of us? The referendum, we learn, invigorated us all: people were engaged in debates and going along to meetings and comedy nights and exhibitions but then, we’re told, after the vote came a “deadly silence but the people are still energised and suddenly needed another way to vent that”.

So the best thing the referendum gave us (depending on how you voted, I suppose) was confidence and new spirit was summed up by Young Fathers who said there was always the attitude, when declaring they wanted to pursue dancing and singing, of: “Dae ye think yer better than somebody?” That question has long been used in Scotland to knock working class children back into place, and in its small-minded, dismissive tone lies the thinking which has long dogged Scotland: that we’re too poor and too wee to do anything. If nothing else, the indyref, in giving Scotland a lashing of energy and confidence, has helped us begin to shrug that off.

Rather than being about art, this programme was about energy. Artists will keep painting, writing  and nicking doormats, and good luck to them, but it’s what the rest of us do with our new found energy that matters.