What comes after this full stop in a tradition, nobody can tell. One of the reasons why it seems so difficult for artists to move beyond the catastrophe is not just because there is a knowledge that the continent’s politics and art went wrong, but the fear (almost certainly self-aggrandising) that the politics went wrong partly because the art went wrong. Of course that would result in a certain reticence as well as fear about the matter that we are dealing with.

For now the world of higher culture remains a part of the wider European crime scene. Artists and others might pick over the debris to work out what happened. But they know that any continuation of that tradition risks at some point kindling the embers and causing the crime to reoccur. The only answer is to conclude that what happened occurred in spite of the art and that art in other words had absolutely no impact on the culture. If that is so and art does indeed make nothing happen, then in the final analysis culture is of absolutely no importance. This is one explanation at least for why the art world currently plays the same games of facile deconstruction that the academy has engaged in. And why the partly New York-imported art of tongue-in-cheek, naïve, ironic or jokey insincerity, fills so many galleries and sells for such huge sums of money.

These three movements in contemporary art – the parasitic, the haunted full stop and the studiedly insincere – are not aberrations in the culture. They represent the culture all too well. The first cannot sustain itself, the second comes with such an oppressive weight that anybody might eventually wish to throw it off, and the last has no point. We can witness the results of this all about us. Go to any of the towns or cities mentioned in this book and you will find that act of throwing off. Although some concerts go on in some places as usual, everywhere there is the attempt to accommodate the changes going on all around. In Malmö one night the only concert in town is a fusion concert that has something to do with falafel, which is only right in its way. The culture should reflect the society and the society has changed. The programmes in the concert hall reflect this as much as the emptying synagogue does. Both are demonstrations of what is happening and adequately suggest the times we are living in.