The Politics of Dancing

Is viewing paintings more than a comfort, a way of plugging into a wider, deeper, more profound perspective during troubled times, or is it merely escapism? I found myself thinking these thoughts the other week as I stood before one of the Canaletto’s in the Wallace Collection. These are magnificent pictures that can, if you stand still, focus and absorb the Venetian scene, the placid water and the active inhabitants, transport you back to early 18 th Century Venice. For moments on end I was mesmerised and as we left the gallery and later, as my friend and I sat in the cafe on the ground floor, I felt somehow different about Brexit, Donald Trump and the gloomy international prognosis.  In what way ‘different’ it was hard to pin down, perhaps it was no more than having glimpsed another world, in which these concerns were not only absent but incomprehensible.  It was an emotion akin to envy, - most certainly misplaced, - of a simpler better age and a more profound sense of som

‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.’   The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852 History does not of course repeat itself in such a neat manner, as Marx well knew as he wrote his famous diatribe against the preposterous figure of Napoleon III. What periods of time sometimes do possess is something more akin to flavours, colours, echoes even smells, of another era. Thus, anyone from late Belle Epoch Paris or the 1920’s  avant-garde  would recognise the vibrancy of the 1960’s. [1] Similarly, the members of the Paris Commune were imbibing the same intoxicating perfume of 1848, as their reactionary opponents. So, as we enter the new year, a year that will be dominated by the populist neo fascism of Trump, that will be scattered with references to the 1930s, Hitler and the collapse of Wiemar culture we need to keep our antennae attuned to what is actually happening now. First statements of the obvious.  1. Trump is not Hitler; he is not