The Politics of Dancing

Much will be missing in any post-Brexit Britain,   many jobs will be gone, of course, but the cultural landscape will have changed. The confident cosmopolitanism of London will have gone, replaced by a sort of cultural depression, whilst the rest of the country will retreat into an ever more angry and xenophobic siege mentality, as the consequences of Brexit hit home. This made manifest by the lost jobs, shrinking of the economy and as country after country decline to agree on trading terms not weighted against us. In short, people will have to face a clear absence of unicorns. The Lions, of course,   left long ago, and good riddance, they were trouble makers, and yet when our backs were against the wall they were nowhere to be found. It was left to the people to do the fighting. Some will imagine they see and hear lions still, of course, but this is not difficult as lions do actually exist and under certain circumstances, an angry street cat can sound like a lion. ...

VAN GOGH IN BRITAIN AT THE TATE MODERN*  So many people visited the Van Gogh exhibition that restitution had to be sought from the Arts Council for damage to the gallery flooring. That was in 1947, the last time London hosted a major Van Gogh exhibition.   The famous Dutch painter was, to put it mildly, a crowd puller. And indeed no sooner had the current exhibition at Tate Britain opened than it sold out. Crowds queue to view the pictures then crowd into the galleries, seeking to get a reasonable view of the paintings amidst the milling mass of eager consumers. Until, as a woman stated standing close by to her friend, “these then are the famous sunflowers.   And indeed, they were, in all their glory, so that you could almost smell the pungent aroma coming from their dark hearts. The Van Gogh ‘brand’ encapsulated? There is also, of course, the madness, the odd business with the ear, the melancholy of the self-portraits and more recently the accompanying song... ...

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” ―  Hannah Arendt,  The Origins of Totalitarianism T witter is a place of anarchy, malicious vitriol, ill-will, racial hatred and partisan political venom. It is also an arena for the exercise of free speech and a forum for the exchange of views and, occasionally, enlightenment. Twitter is also a home, either from the left or right, for the opponents of free speech and unfettered discourse. Rarely does a day go by without a demand that someone should be silenced, ‘no-platformed’ or prosecuted. In some instances, the silencing involves less sophisticated methods, by subjecting ‘miscreants’ to a tsunami of vitriol and hate designed to drive them off twitter, women being disproportionately...

Pierre Bonnard at The Tate Modern  Stairs to The Garden 1942 Pierre Bonnard I looked forward to seeing the Bonnard  exhibition at the Tate Modern, however, whilst there is much to enjoy, I left with a strange feeling of claustrophobic melancholy. Something about the exhibition seemed sad and forlorn, more so owing, perhaps, to Bonnet’s reputation.    Pierre Bonnard, painter of domestic harmony, of glorious landscapes and gardens that assault the eye with bursting shells of colour, exploding yellows and reds, crimson and blue; the happy painter who through two world wars and the troubled inter-war years continued to paint pictures that depicted not only visions of intimate domesticity but the contentment of a settled life which had a love of beauty at its heart. The Belle Époque is perhaps the most burnished period in modern history.  This I suspect is a consequence as much of the cultural, scientific and artistic triumphs of the period as the mann...

At the height of the Arab Spring, I remember the dismay as the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt and immediately began an assault on that countries secular institutions and the modern secular tradition in that country.  At the time, I remember writing, possibly rather patronisingly, that the Brotherhood had mistaken majoritarianism for democracy.  That they were not the first to make this mistake and would not be the last. The idea that the winner takes all and ‘losers’ no longer count is just as poisonous to a democracy, pluralism and democratic institutions as any authoritarian demagogue.  The favourite tool of the majoritarian, as we have discovered recently, to our cost, is the plebiscite since this provides the either/or question that enables highly complex issues to be reduced to a simplistic good/bad formula. Moreover, a simple majority is all that is required to cast the ‘losers’ into the outer darkness of the bad. One vote will do. An attitude emerges, b...

A Weimar Monarchy Freud wrote that humans are incapable of fully comprehending their own extinction.   A similar incomprehension I believe can happen on a much larger scale, that is with respect to whole societies, and this denial is particularly pronounced in the Anglosphere democracies.   The denial takes the form of reasoning that, despite Trump and Brexit, the truly bad stuff cannot happen here. This complacent reasoning has first to overcome the obstacle that the bad stuff is already happening, and secondly that simply waiting for Trump’s term of office to expire or for Brexit to be done and dusted will not do. The damage done, not least in the great divisions created, will not disappear any time soon, indeed with respect to Brexit, we have not reached anything like the nadir yet. Already the fascist trope about being stabbed in the back/betrayed by cosmopolitans’narrative is being promoted by hard-line Brexiteers. Whilst the coming economic problems are unlikely to ...

REFLECTIONS ON SURREALISM  It is difficult to believe but we will soon be approaching the hundredth birthday of Surrealism, child of DADA and Freud, the most famous art movement of the 20 th Century. From advertising to comic books and movie posters surrealist images are ubiquitous and ingrained into the culture. What precocious teenager did not have an Athena Salvador Dali poster on their wall? For a taste for surrealism was a short cut to showing that you were ‘deep’ and ‘arty.’ Iconic Dali Image It’s very success was its greatest failure, when images adorn every Tube station platform or magazine advert they cease to be original, let alone shocking. So, it was with mixed feelings that I approached the Dorothea Tanning exhibition at the Tate. Volkswagon Advertisement Given the rampant sexism that even now characterises the art world, it is perhaps understandable, if unforgivable, that I had only ever heard of Tanning as the wife of Max Ernst so that her work wa...