To the barricades! Why the perilous 2020s are likely to spawn beautiful art, films and music marked by rage and escapism

Getty/AP
Getty/AP

After all, it’s not that awful,” The Third Man’s Harry Lime might have concluded after last month’s Tory landslide. “You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love… 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Now it may not be entirely fair to bring a fictional character into this, nor indeed is it generally accepted that the Swiss invented the cuckoo clock, nor true that the Borgias ruled anything that could be described as “Italy”, or that the Renaissance flourished under the yoke of cruel tyrants (its cradle, Florence, was a republic, later ruled by the Medicis). It’s not even the case that Switzerland, for all its neutrality has managed anything like a half-millennium of peace, but, hey, you get the idea – political turbulence produces great art and radical invention, stability is one long yawn. It’s going to be a hell of a decade!

Well, there is at least some evidence to suggest that may be true. The most divisive period in recent British political history – the Thatcher years – saw direct cultural responses like the rise of illegal raves, anarcho-hippy-environmentalist New Age culture, dystopian comic books such as Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982), searing socially conscious TV such as Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), politicised pop like The Specials’ “Ghost Town” (1981) and Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding” (1982), as well as politicised theatre, such as Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) and Serious Money (1987) and Jim Cartwright’s Road (1986).

But it also produced a colourful array of escapist stage musicals, including Andrew Lloyd Webber’s now almost-forgotten Cats (1981), plus Duran Duran yachting off in pastel suits (1982), and the phenomenon of the Young British Artists, with Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin as the movement’s figureheads, whose entrepreneurial verve ought to have had Thatcher purring. The decade’s most enduring television highlight, Brideshead Revisited (1981), meanwhile, looked wistfully back to a Rees-Mogg-like vision of a world defined by class. Plus, everyone liked The Smiths in the Eighties and look where that ended up. A rush and a push and the land that we stand on is Farage’s.

Compare it with the peaceable Noughties though, and the counterpoints are in reverse. A decade of Coldplay and Snow Patrol, Westlife and Dido was given a shot in the arm by Amy Winehouse and The Libertines and some street smarts by Dizzee Rascal and The Streets. False jeopardy ruled in reality TV creations such as Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! In art, the most notable shift was structural, with the opening of Tate Modern in 2000; its most memorable exhibit was Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, in the radiant presence of which visitors would lie on the floor for an hour at a time basking in its serenity. Well I did, anyway, and fell asleep. Wake me up when the Borgias are back.

Does the argument truly stand up, though? You could make a case that the single most important art work of the 20th century was Malevich’s Black Square (2015), the “zero point of painting”, which came out of the turbulent period (and world war) that led up to the Russian Revolution, but you could equally say it was John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), which was conceived in the bright, positive glow of American victory in the Second World War. It’s probable that the century’s most influential artist was not Picasso, whose Guernica (1937) was made in response to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, but Andy Warhol, who was obsessed with consumerism, celebrity and fame.

The American Sixties make a stronger case for the power of expression in tumultuous times. Atomic annihilation loomed as the Cold War gripped, and the US became fatally mired in the Vietnam War, just as conflict erupted at home with the civil rights struggle. Television brought the bloodshed into the living rooms of millions, as a counterculture formed. Dylan set protest to guitars acoustic and electric, The Doors’ Jim Morrison sang of “a desperate land” in “The End” (1967), intoning the exculpatory mantra, “The west is the best, the west is the best. Get here, and we’ll do the rest” (or maybe he was just singing about California). Performance art, such as Yayoi Kusama’s naked flag burning on Brooklyn Bridge (1968), appalled the passers-by, and environmentalism reared its head in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the climate fiction of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965).

Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (Creative Commons)
Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (Creative Commons)

Drug culture also made its presence felt in the decade and has infected everything since. But was Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) ultimately more significant than Philip K Dick’s novel from the same year, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I don’t think so. The decade was bracketed by Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).

Oppression is undeniably a powerful creative engine. The African-American experience has birthed entirely new musical forms, gospel, blues, jazz and rock’n’roll, as well as hip-hop. The period when the latter was gestating in the Seventies block parties of the New York City projects, undisturbed by A&R men and market forces, was surely its most important. (The suspicion now is that anything vaguely new would be strangled in the act of emerging by the rush to herald it, market it and monetise it.) Hip-hop, fully grown, could give voice to pretty much any emotion, including deep and abiding anger – “and we hate po-po, wanna kill us dead in the street for sure...” as Kendrick Lamar put it in 2015; “Here is a land that never gave a damn about a brother like me,” in the words of Public Enemy in 1988.

In the UK, the garage scene mutated into grime, which has a similar articulacy. Rage has been a potent artistic drive in other contexts, too. In Seventies Belfast, at the height of the Troubles, Stiff Little Fingers lashed out in all directions, especially at the sectarian paramilitaries that drew young people in to die “for their important cause” – “Stuff their f***ing armies”, sang Jake Burns, “killing isn’t my idea of fun.”

There are warning signs aplenty, though, that anger and hatred may turn out to be the dominant emotions of the 2020s, which suggests that any artistic response employing them isn’t going to help. We’ve just lived through a decade in which it became clear that rage is easy to trigger via mass and social media. Activating the body’s biochemistry to foment fury has become as exploitable as putting “jumps” into horror movies to flood the body with fight or flight chemicals to intensify fear. Horror, porn and hatred are all biochemical events.

Getting people angry has become the go-to tactic of the press and political demagogues, knowing that anger holds the attention and can be directed to effect change. It worked on the people in the nation with the best deal in the European Union – oh, that was us – and it can work on the people with the most admired public service broadcaster in the world. Someone in a room somewhere is probably thinking of a “doing word” right now for a three-word slogan that makes it seem we can all “achieve” something by dismantling the BBC. Watch those attacks keep rolling in. And we are all susceptible to manipulation.

So maybe not the return of punk rock and shock art, but I’m not pretending to know what the decade will look and sound like. Art and politics have already been interacting in surprising ways in the 2010s. Artists such as Chris, formerly Christine and the Queens, have made pop a radical art form, while the most visible UK political artist of the era, Banksy, is not even considered enough of an artist to get a Turner Prize nomination (though surely worth one for the self-destroying painting, Love is in the Bin, alone). Television has struggled with social consciousness – as audiences switch off at the first whiff of being preached at – but we’re in a golden age of reactive theatre, where directors and writers are challenging everything from blame culture to the criminal justice system.

Britain in the 2020s, presided over by the likes of home secretary Cruella Patel, doesn’t look like fun. And as the world burns, the schism between old and young is widening. As Dylan once said: “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.” These perilous times could just be a catalyst for new work, new forms, new ways. We shall see.

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