In his famous essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, published in 1852, Karl Marx noted that history repeats itself, “once as tragedy, and again as farce”. He was referring to Napoleon I and his nephew Napoleon III, with respect to the latter seizing power and implementing a dictatorship in France in 1851. For many the tragedy of Brexit in the UK was followed by the farce of the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States. The same aphorism could be applied to the Italian Referendum, in which the No vote prevailing led to the resignation of the prime minister, Matteo Renzi. How tragedy and farce will play out in the forthcoming elections in other European countries, especially France and Germany in 2017, is, at the time of writing, anybody’s guess, although the defeat of a far-right candidate in the Austrian presidential election may be a cause for some optimism. Some commentators have suggested that the rising nationalist populism in the US and Europe is a sign of the end of the liberal order. Yet this liberal order has brought us increasing inequality, austerity and growing poverty for those people and places early in the twenty-first century. They have been left behind within the great unravelling of the global economy since the global financial crisis that began in late 2007.

But these moments and intervals of shock and fracture are nothing new, especially in Europe. In his masterly study The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change the Australian art historian Robert Hughes wrote: