A sculpture was stolen from Dulwich Park in south east London. It was a good one - Two Forms (Divided Circle) by Barbara Hepworth. I liked it and I picnicked next to it once or twice. It wasn’t easy to work out what the piece was supposed to signify when it was still there, but its disappearance has a clear message for the UK and for large swaths of the Continent: “Welcome back to hard times!”
It got stolen by ruthless petty thieves who in better economic and social times would focus on an occasional car without resorting to cultural heritage; or if they did, they’d do it to sell its artistic value* rather than its weight value.
These days, eccentric art disappears from leafy neighbourhoods in England, and most other things of any value disappear from summer houses in Poland. One could argue about where there are more beggars in the streets and outside churches.
The theft of a great piece of art from a park in an affluent and laid-back part of Europe’s financial capital and squandering it for the benefit of a scrap metal yard symbolizes to me the squandering of much of the 20th century’s economic heritage. In many ways we’re about to find ourselves back in the 19th century. Which may be a good thing, all things considered.
Because for the last 50 years or so, European (and American) politics has been made as if tactical expediency replaced for good - and for real - hard reality. And economies have been tinkered with as if the voters’ fancy officially replaced inviolable rules.
Social democracy decided to suspend millenia-old laws and legislate a new world into existence. It has failed and now it’s time for all of us to foot the bill. And the 19th century always insisted on paying the bills and - more importantly - not running them up in the first place. It had a reputation of keeping in quite close touch with reality, too. Otherwise how would it be able to build its very real empires, and not declared ones, the kind Europe runs today?
And perhaps now it’s also time to listen to those who understand the 19th century better than most and let them run the show, so that we can catch up with time and re-do the 20th century and enter the 21st, properly?
*I met once in Wales an upper-class English chap whose place in London had been burgled not long before. The thieves stole quite a few paintings, but left some on the walls. “Thank God they were working class burglars”, the guy said, “and had no idea which pictures were of real value."
