Daily Archives: June 20, 2020

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Plays about art have the potential to be masterpieces or just painfully pretentious. Its a fine line, but the ones that do it well can create a thing of beauty.

There are plenty of discussions to be had about the nature of responsibility and truth when it comes to art, and artists lives have depths of drama, hedonism and anguish to be plumbed for the stage.

From biographies to surreal musings on obsession, here are some the plays about art to seek out:

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John Logans Red was inspired by a trip to Tate Modern, where he saw Mark Rothkos Seagram Murals. He said that as soon as he read the label recounting how they were created, the entire play came to him. Set in fifties New York, Rothko (originally played by Alfred Molina) is under commission to paint a series of murals for an upscale new restaurant. His assistant (a fictional character named Ken initially played by Eddie Redmayne and, later, Alfred Enoch) challenges him on accepting a commercial endeavour. In reality, Rothko told Harpers Bazaar his reasoning, saying: I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.

Yasmina Rezas French three-hander stood the test of time. It ran for eight years in the West End (with everyone from Albert Finney to Richard Griffiths to the League of Gentleman in the casts), and returned for its 20 year anniversary to the Old Vic in 2016 with Rufus Sewell, Tim Key and Paul Ritter. A play about art and friendship, it sees a 15-year-long bond between three men tested when one buys an incredibly expensive, completely white painting or a piece of white shit. The play has been translated into 20 languages, with the English version adapted by Christopher Hampton.

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French pointillist artist George Seurats painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was the inspiration for Stephen Sondheim and James Lapines musical. The story focuses on the painter and his great-grandson, also called George and also an artist, who grapples with the same ideas of artistic inspiration a century later. As the song goes: There are worse things than staring at the water as you're posing for a picture being painted by your lover, in the middle of the summer.

Artemisia Gentileschi's significance in Western art history has only recently been appreciated. In her lifetime, her talents were overshadowed by a sexual assault. In 1612, Agostino Tassi was tried for the rape of the painter when she was just 15, in a case that lasted seven months and gripped Renaissance Rome. Breach Theatre turned the real court transcripts from the trial into a new show. Bringing together myth, history and contemporary commentary, the play asks how much has changed in the intervening centuries and tells the story of a woman who took revenge through her art. The play was supposed to have a Barbican run, but instead streamed online over lockdown.

Nick Dears play, set in 18th century London, compresses the events of ten years of William Hogarths life into one single night. Michael Kitchen, Niamh Cusack and Simon Russell Beale were part of the opening RSC cast in 1986. According to Dear, what started as a play about the political manipulation of art turned into a lurid comedy of sexual manners, telling of the escapades of artists, politicians and royalty, and debating the nature of ambition, gender and the artists responsibility.

Another play that was supposed to open in London only to be scuppered by the pandemic is Jeremy O. Harriss melodrama Daddy. Franklin, a young Black artist about to embark on his first show, meets Andre, an older, wealthy, white art collector. He moves into Andres Bel Air home, where the action takes place in and around a real swimming pool, sunken into the stage. A surreal exploration of art, intimacy, identity and commodification follows, with George Michaels Father Figure playing in the background.

Janet Adler and Margaret Gibb, a pair of conceptual artists described as the most ferociously uncompromising voice of their generation, are the subject of Tim Crouchs experimental 2014 play. Adler has died, leaving her partner behind. Lou, formerly an art student and now an actress making a film about the object of her life-long obsession, Adler, breaks into the artists home unaware that Gibb is still living in it. Adler & Gibb looks at the pretensions of the art world and the way in which people leech off those they admire. Crouch said: The story developed over five years and still, even in rehearsal, I didnt know quite what it was.

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Originally titled Little Dancer after the statue that inspired it, Tony Award-winner Lynn Ahrens new musical imagines the life of Marie, the 14-year-old ballet dancer who disappeared from records after she posed for Edgar Degas. As a young woman, she is pulled between her love and her talent as a dancer, with the musical showing the well-trodden conflict between life and art. Its early days for this play, but we hope there will be more theres always room for a ballet/musical crossover.

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The best theatre plays about art, from Sunday in the Park with George to Red - Evening Standard

The music industry oracles on Black Lives Matter, surviving cancer, and crafting their new album Translation in lockdown.

Taken from the Autumn/Winter 2020 issue of Rollacoaster. Order your copy now.

In the distant future, when the world has been reduced to smouldering dystopian plains, and curious extra-terrestrial life finds itself methodically dredging the decimated earth for past relics, you can count on any Black Eyed Peas record like a cultural time capsule to reflect exactly where humanity was at, at that exact time. Or just before.

You see, throughout the last three decades, the salient pioneers have managed to maintain their status as one of the biggest boundary-pushing groups in the world restlessly warping, reinventing and redefining their addictive olio of pop, hip-hop, dance and conscious rap. The three founding members will.i.am, Taboo and Apl.de.ap harbour a preternatural foresight that has consistently positioned them teetering all-knowingly at the precipice of the next zeitgeist, right before it topples over us. Music industry oracles, if you will.

And their celestial music has soundtracked just about everything in our teen-to-adult lives. Their breakthrough album Elephunk in 2003 with longtime BEP singer Fergie saw their commercial success hit household name status with its breezy, thumping exuberance, tied off with politically-charged track Where Is The Love? (originally written in response to 9/11, but showcasing its heartbreakingly timeless relevance when rebooted in 2016 aimed at Americas gun violence crisis, and then again in an emotional live performance with Ariana Grande following the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing). Monkey Business in 2005 spurred on a hedonistic R&B era with the revved-up energy of Pump It and accessible house party fodder of My Humps. But world domination became irrefutable with 2009s party behemoth The E.N.D., which saw the group focus on our call for dance floor hedonism, with global hits I Gotta Feeling, Boom Boom Pow and Meet Me Halfway. After a years-long hiatus, their ambitious next project, 2018s Masters of the Sun, pivoted to a new era with tech-driven ideas; an intersection of an album meets a socially-conscious, augmented-reality comic book, and saw BEP trade their club prowess for a return to gritty politically-charged jazz flows in hit track Street Livin. Its a song, that no doubt akin to Where Is the Love? with its incensed lyricism and poignant indictment of the criminal justice system and police brutality, has bearing with the current Black Lives Matter protests and riots.

The forward-thinking vanguards have become an irrepressible industry institution propelling, shaping and spearheading whatever comes next. This summer sees the group drop their highly-anticipated eighth studio album Translation their first pop album in 10 years this time turning their focus to a Latin-infused sound with global rhythms and internet-breaking features of Shakira, J Balvin, Nicky Jam, Latin-trap star Ozuna and more.

But 2020 has been a year of uncertainty. No one could have foreseen a global pandemic, or its economic repercussions, or the unjust death of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis triggering global uprising and instilling a collective conscience in people all over the world. In the palm of my hand, my phone and social media feeds are dosing out overwhelming measures of panic, brutality, and polarity. And when I catch up with the trio over the phone from LA, they are impassioned, and hope releasing such triumphant sounds at such a time will help their fans explaining in a Twitter statement: with all the negativity, panic, pain, stress and confusion[we] think some sunshine and joy can lift peoples spirits

Their blueprint for success, like the thundering course of natural waters, are impossible to replicate. But one thing is clear, Black Eyed Peas are going nowhere. I caught up with will.i.am, Taboo and Apl.de.ap and talked about Black Lives Matter, surviving cancer, and crafting their album in lockdown

Rollacoaster: Hello guys, hows it going at this crazy time?

will.i.am: [doing an impression of a posh British accent] Hello, this is Will. Im doing a very rubbish UK accent.

[Laughter] Rollacoaster: Not rubbish at all! Im very impressed. How has lockdown been for you guys?

Taboo: Im in Los Angeles. I live in Pasadena so Ive just been locked down at my home, with my family, and periodically Ive been able to social distance at the studio with Apl and Will.

will.i.am: Yeah, it feels like COVID-19 was a year ago with the rise of this new thing that were dealing with right now. There are soldiers on the street, our city is on fire, businesses are destroyed.

Apl.de.ap: Theres people fighting, you know? The actual looters and then people who have to protest and protect buildings at the same time. Its really confusing.

Rollacoaster: You guys started out with conscious hip-hop, pouring socially astute messages into your music. I mean, Where Is The Love? came out 17 years ago, covering police brutality and systemic racism. With everything thats going on right now, is it kind of devastating to feel like nothing has changed in 17 years?

will.i.am: Nothing has changed for the black person in America. Nothing has changed in 100 years. I mean, theres been extreme progress with Jim Crow being undone, but the systematic racism that still exists in our justice system, nothing has changed.And you have this crippling and manipulating of lives, wickedness being implemented, lives being taken, broadcasted on our phones for us to see it happen. And at the same time, people havent been working. And if you aint working, you havent been making money; if youre not making money youre struggling, not eating. Its tough, so its compound on compound. Its the system giving people a triple middle finger.

Rollacoaster: And because of social media, fans are noticing the artists that are staying silent now. Do you think that musicians have a moral responsibility to use their platform to be vocal?

Apl.de.ap: You have to be mindful of how you react, it cant come from a angry place. You have to really take your time and get the right messaging.

Taboo: And then you have folks like Colin Kaepernick, where unfortunately it didnt go well for him. He got banned from the NFL for making a statement saying that its not right whats happening in our community.

will.i.am: Its not to say that every single musician has to have a moral responsibility, thats not fair. But we do need to celebrate those musicians who do do that. Bob Marley was a godsend. The Clash. Marvin Gaye. I think fans are intelligent enough to know that entertainment is entertainment. You know, not every artist has to be Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, but the ones that do step out we need to do a better job celebrating those people.

Rollacoaster: Looking at your journey so far, your art goes through these massive changes. With your new record, it feels like were at a different iteration of party music now. How do you decide whats next?

will.i.am: Its future casting. Like when we did electro music that was like, this is where its going, lets get on this, lets start collaborating, lets research, lets network like we did for The E.N.D. We saw what was happening in the underground in 2007. So we collaborated with the Boys Noizes and the David Guettas. And with the conscious jazz-influenced hip-hop, we were just students and fans of music of A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. We travelled around the world and we were like, wait a second, Macy Gray has a whole bunch of demographics that come to our show and Elephunk was born. And then Where Is The Love? was written in response to 9/11. And Monkey Business was an extension of our global travels and selling out venues that got us to arena status. Then after The E.N.D., we took a little break. Taboo fought and beat cancer, and now were students again. Then we did Masters of The Sun which is about police brutality and injustice, and we returned to our origins and made jazzy, street-conscious, social activist music. I was just listening to Street Livin right now and I was like, we could put this out right now with everything thats happening.

Apl.de.ap: Where Is The Love? (Remix) too.

Rollacoaster: Theyre both super fitting with the current times. And its so interesting that you talk about your changing demographics whats been your response to this rise of TikTok and user-generated content, with people out there doing different dance challenges to one of your latest singles Mamacita?

Taboo: Our core audience are the Peabodies, who are the fanbase that weve had throughout the years because they rocked with us no matter what era. When were were doing the jazzy hip-hop, then it was more underground backpack-type audiences, and then when we transitioned to Elephunk there was a broader audience. And now with TikTok, you tap into a younger demographic, and its cool because we come from the dance world, so we see folks doing their own versions of the Mamacita challenge. Its cool to see where people can take it and how inspired they are by our music and our frequency.

will.i.am: TikTok is like hyper-activity, its really not about your video, its about the content you give them for them to make their own visuals, which is a whole new world to engage. You set off activities and you see people compete. Its like when youre at the concert and you point the mic at the audience and they say where is the love, or you sing I gotta feeling, mic to the crowd, they go woo hoo in unison. Thats TikTok. Its call and response. Everybodys engaged. Doing a different version of the same thing.

Rollacoaster: You guys keep talking about this future casting can you explain what you mean a little bit?

will.i.am: Theres a lack of different types of content makers and participants in culture. There are some people that are like, this is happening right now, lets hop on it. Thats the cookie cutter. They see a shape, and they duplicate the shape after the shape already happened. And then theres folks that are like, I wonder whats coming next? Do you think people are going to like this, or do you think theyre going to like the combination of this style and that? Were those type of folks.

And weve seen you implement this future casting every step of the way. The multi-faceted format of Masters Of The Sun was so unique, looking into augmented reality and incorporating music in that way. Do you think were at the end of putting out straight-forward music albums?

will.i.am: I think were at the end of a lot of things. We have this one good friend of ours, who is a conspiracist with a big heart, and he said something to us like two or three years ago. We were all at dinner, and he was like soak it all in fellas, and enjoy this moment because these are the good old days. And he was absolutely one trillion percent correct. Why? Because we cant gather and go to a restaurant together right now, who knows if that experience will ever be the way that it was before, where all twenty people were at a table, eating dinner, freely breathing, laughing out loud.

Rollacoaster: Its so true. The future is a bit of a question mark right now. And how do you think its all going to affect the future of music?

will.i.am: Music will be needed. Theres going to be new types of sounds, new types of social gatherings around music. A whole new underground is being born right now. Every genre from jazz to blues to swing to hip-hop, it all was underground, and somethings being invented right now. Somethings happening right now.

Taboo: And with ways of artists performing, we had the opportunity to perform with some technology, kind of like robots, with automatic cameras that were filming us. Its about respecting the times but also finding creative ways to perform. Its about being creative and pushing the envelope of performances and how we can still create content for the world to get a glimpse of us, and making an effort to give you something other than just a Zoom performance.

Apl.de.ap: I feel like were going to slowly immerse into performing again. Being creative with like drive-in shows. Its going to look funny and there will be separation, but its just about testing it out, you know?

Rollacoaster: How do you guys feel about releasing a new album in the midst of all of this?

will.i.am: Yeah, its kind of crazy. Its like a double-edged sword because you want to be celebratory about an album or a project but then youre realising whats happening in real time, and it just hurts. It hurts because people are bringing up Where Is The Love? every time something bad happens. Our song that we created on the hills of 9/11 is always brought up and we love that song and its a song to provide therapy for folks that need it.

Rollacoaster: Why is your new album called Translation? And how does it mark a new era of Black Eyed Peas?

will.i.am: Translation is empathy, understanding, collaboration. To translate from one culture, and one language into something somebody else can understand, it takes patience, it takes tolerance, it takes educating. Translation is the bridge. And Black Eyed Peas, we bridge the gap, from this culture to that culture. We were the bridge between electronic music and pop. We were the bridge between what was going on in America to the rest of the world with Where Is The Love? Now were bridging whats happening in the Latin community to the rest of the world.

Rollacoaster: Knowing your track record, following this album theres going to be an explosion of Latin music

will.i.am: The Latin explosion has already happened. Its just to the rest of the world with English-speaking countries, they dont yet know the power of the Latin world. Like, Olly Murs is big in the UK, but not around the world.

Rollacoaster: Thats so true

will.i.am: Theres such a disconnect between what happens in the Spanish-speaking countries versus what happens in the English world. The English world is super isolated, like you could be big in freaking Atlanta but nobody knows about you in Ottawa, Canada. Like J Balvin is big in Columbia and also big in all of the Spanish-speaking countries. Olly Murs is big in the UK, but not big in all English-speaking countries. You could be big in freaking Wales, but they dont know you in Hawaii. What do you mean you mean like a whale in the ocean? No Wales bro- I see whales all the time!

Rollacoaster: [Laughter] Yes, that disconnect needs to be bridged. And ultimately, what do you want the impact of the album to be?

will.i.am: We designed it as a playlist because when youre making a playlist you want to make sure every song is a gem. Everybodys like, Ive got my singles, heres a bunch of bullshit songs to surround them with. There are very few albums that have like jam-packed gems, like [Michael Jacksons] Off The Wall, Thriller, [Stevie Wonders] Songs In The Key of Life, Marvin Gayes Whats Going On.

Rollacoaster: That makes sense; every album should really be full of hits. And what were the biggest challenges of tweaking and honing this record in lockdown?

Taboo: During the pandemic when it all went down, fortunately Will was in the studio, making sure that everything sonically went together, and transitioned from one song to another. He stayed focused on the project while everybody had to be isolated, and the studio was his home. It was a labour of love and time and effort to put together this whole project.

will.i.am: One time we were frustrated with how the songs were going. Apl was like, Will, can I be honest with you? You keep saying were missing something and I gotta tell you, I know what were missing and I hope you dont get mad. Its you bro, youre not focused. Youre doing this tech stuff and all this stuff and that stuff, and when we did Elephunk you were 100% there, and when we did Monkey Business you were 100% there, when we did The E.N.D., even though you were doing your tech stuff you were at least 90% there. But right now, youre not even 60% there. And youre frustrated but its you that youre frustrated with, because youre not there. I was like shit. You broke me down.

Apl.de.ap: I kept it simple and I said, Will, we need your all. Thats it. And not being distracted with a million things. I think thats what made the album really tight. Its a playlist to be put on and get the party going. And thats what we really want to say right now.

Taboo: [Laughs] Will had that Michael Jordan moment where he wanted to go play baseball, and then he went back to basketball. And then started winning championships again.

Black Eyed Peas new album Translation is out now via RCA UK.

Photographed over Skype by

Bartek Szmigulski

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Black Eyed Peas On Crafting New Album Translation In Lockdown - Wonderland Magazine

With her rosy cheeks, wide eyes, and frothy wardrobe, Elle Fanning, as Catherine, can look absolutely guileless one second and blood-hungry the next.Photograph by Ollie Upton / Hulu

In his 2011 biography of Catherine the Great (born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, in Pomerania, in 1729), the late historian Robert K. Massie writes of her that more than any other monarch of her day, there was always a wide latitude for humor. Perhaps it was Catherines way of soften[ing] imperial presence with a sense of humor and a quick tongue, as Massie puts it, that enabled her to enact one of the greatest coups dtat in monarchical history: in the summer of 1762, eighteen years after arriving in Saint Petersburg as a teen-age bride to the future Peter III, the (allegedly) impotent and ill-tempered Emperor of Russia, she orchestrated a plan to overthrow him and ascend to the throne herself. Peter died just eight days after the coup, likely at an assassins hand, at a palace called Ropsha. Catherine, who ruled Russia for the next thirty-four years, proclaimed that Peters cause of death was hemorrhoidal colic, and then gave Ropsha to her lover, Grigory Orlov, who had helped her devise and execute the scheme. When it came to seizing power, the empress was deadly serious, which made her good-humored affect all the more threatening. She was a voracious readerof Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers, mostlya hobby that sharpened her mind and her tongue. When she arrived on Russian soil, she was a lamb. By the time she took the throne, she was a viper.

The Greata droll, morbid new ten-episode series about Catherine and Peter that started streaming on Hulu last monthdoes not pretend to be historically accurate: the shows title card comes with an asterisk proclaiming it to be an occasionally true story. The series creator, Tony McNamara, plays fast and loose with the biographical facts that were so painstakingly recorded in Massies doorstopper. For the sake of dramatic expediency, the series compresses Catherines sprawling, ruthless ambitions into a compact, jewel-box time frame. The fictional Catherine, played with flinty cunning by Elle Fanning, does not wait almost two decades before staging her revolt. In the first episode, she looks forward to her new life as an empress with a swooning, girlish romanticism, but her outlook begins to darken almost from the moment she attends her first palace feast. Historians tell us that Peter III was a hotheaded man who was rendered unattractive after a battle with smallpox; he had far more passion for military stratagems than for his wifeor any other woman, for that matter. In her memoirs, Catherine succinctly roasted him as an idiot. In The Great, Peter (Nicholas Hoult) retains the idiocy but is also dashing and debonair, a frattish sybarite with a sadists taste for violence and an insatiable sexual appetite. He coldly greets his bride-to-be by saying, You look taller in your portrait, after staring for long seconds at her backside.

Despite its rollicking biographical liberties, The Great does seem to preserve something of Catherines quick, curious manner. With her rosy cheeks, wide eyes, and frothy wardrobe, Fanning can look absolutely guileless one second and blood-hungry the next. By the end of the first episode, Catherine has come to see that the only way to liberate herself from a tyrant is to learn his ways; that to escape her terrible marriage, she must become terrible herself. In this way, The Great pleasingly avoids smearing a shiny feminist gloss over the empresss story. In the fifth episode, titled War and Vomit, Catherine visits the front lines of a Russian battlefield while carrying a Tiffany-blue box full of macarons, in order to pose for an official battle painting. When she offers a cookie to a bloody soldier who says that he cannot take one, because he has lost his fingers, she proceeds to shove a macaron directly into his mouth. Its pistachio, if thats helpful, she says.

McNamara, who wrote the screenplay for The Favourite, from 2018, has distinguished himself with a style of royal satire that provokes moral and physical repulsion in equal measure. That filmstarring Olivia Colman as a petulant, tyrannical Queen Anne, and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone as the ladies-in-waiting warring for her attentionsubverted queenly history by foregrounding Annes battles with gout and ravenous sexual demands. It is suggested that perhaps subsisting on a regular diet of mutton and cream at a time when plumbing technology was not very advanced may have led monarchs to smell like ripe gorgonzola, and to act just as sour. The same nauseating sense of hedonism pervades The Great. The show is ostentatiously vulgar (McNamara peppers the word cunt into nearly every scene, as if it is fine seasoning) and gross (I gasped when the archbishop, having informed Catherine that he must check whether her interior wall has been breached, reaches up to moisten two fingers in his mouth). Excess and violence are horrifically intertwined. In a late episode, Peter, afraid that someone is planning to overthrow him, sets up five torture stations at the palace to try to smoke out the traitor. This looks great! he says to the court doctor, surveying the scene from a balcony. In order to prove that she is no traitor (even though she absolutely is one), Catherine offers to sit at the fingernail-pulling station herself. The ensuing closeup, of Fanning writhing in pain, is enough to turn your stomach, but it also makes a point. Nobody is spared in Peters palace, least of all his flaxen bride.

The show is, despite all this, somehow a comedy, full of vituperative one-liners and thistle-sharp insults. (Women are for seeding, not reading, Peter tells Catherine, early in the show. Later, she reads him a passage by Diderot: Man will never be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest.) It is also a visual feast, with lavish set dressings and richly colored costumes. I couldnt help thinking, as I watched, that given the global halt in film production due to the pandemic, The Great may be the last over-the-top period piece to be released this year. There are fatty pheasants and cookie towers, hunting expeditions and ballroom escapades. Hoult prances around in animal pelts, waistcoats, and a comically large cross necklace, looking like a spoiled little boy who raided his mothers fairy box. When Catherine tells him to listen to his people and give them what they want, he snorts, What they want? Its a novel idea. Possibly French? I am a prisoner here, married to an idiot, Catherine says, in a line that echoes the assessment in her memoirs. Like The Favourite, The Great extends great sympathy to its monarch, held captive in a life she did not choose, while also mercilessly skewering her ruthlessness and misplaced largesse. The show may not be historically accurate, but it slices through history like a hot poker, to royaltys rancid core.

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The Great, Reviewed: A Proudly Fictional, Pleasurably Vulgar Spin on Catherine the Great - The New Yorker

John Maynard Keynes lived through two world wars as well as the great depression between them, and as an economic adviser to British and American governments did his best to fend off political disaster. But Zachary Carters solid, sombre intellectual biography begins at a moment when Keynes himself, in his private capacity, seemed to be causing a seismic upset. The Universe totters, Lytton Strachey informed his cronies in the Bloomsbury set in 1922: the cataclysm had happened because Keynes whose previous lovers, conscientiously indexed in his archives, were a troupe of nameless men, among them the shoemaker of the Hague and the clergyman had taken up with a woman, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova.

By starting with this salacious titbit, Carter enticingly sexes up a book that soon settles down, as Keynes did, to be grimly serious. When he married Lopokova, Keynes gave up the sportive pursuit known in Bloomsbury as buggery and, as he saltily put it, relished being foxed and gobbled by his wife. Cultivating what he called a disgusting and financial state of mind, he became a public man so loftily impersonal that in an obituary in 1946 his former adversary Lionel Robbins called him God-like.

But conservatives have never stopped alluding to his libertine youth as a means of disparaging his assault on balanced budgets and penny-pinching austerity. Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian toff who wore riding gloves when he lectured at Harvard, sniffed that because Keynes was childless, his principles of economic management were short-run indifferent to future outcomes. The slur was recently repeated by Niall Ferguson. In 1983 William Rees-Mogg the proud begetter of jiving Jake, choreographer of the Westminster conga diagnosed Keyness hostility to the gold standard as a symptom of the amoralism for which homosexuals were in his view notorious.

Carter wastes no time on such odious aspersions, and instead interprets the hedonism of Bloomsbury as a positive influence on Keynes, whose ideal aim was the democratisation of fine living. Economy began as a miserly, parsimonious business: the Greek word refers to the virtuous practice of making do with less. Keynes, however, saw it as a doctrine that preached joy through statistics.

Im dubious about Carters claim that KeynessEconomic Consequences of the Peacedeserves to be ranked with StracheysEminent Victoriansand EliotsThe Waste Landas a modernist masterpiece; he does a better job of presenting the economist as an artist manqu when he suggests that Keynes saw money as something illusory a fiction, or what linguists call a floating signifier. Keynes daringly acknowledged his reliance on artifice by describing economic policy as a meaningless ritual, a trick to ensure that we continue spending the abstract, notional contents of our wallets.

The price of peace in 1918 was a grand scheme devised by Keynes that proposed sending money round in a circle, paid out to Germany as funds for rehabilitation and then paid back as reparations. Carter admiringly likens this arrangement to the mad machines in Rube Goldbergs cartoons; it might have held the squabbling world together for a while if President Woodrow Wilson hadnt bluntly rejected the elaborate, deceptive rules of the game.

Economics, for Keynes a form of play, was underpinned by aesthetics. An off-hand metaphor revealed his partiality: in Britains imperial heyday, he said the Bank of England was the conductor of the international orchestra. He reminded governments of their duty to subsidise entertainers, whose divine gift brightened our lives. His utopia was the Covent Garden theatre which is now the Royal Opera House, where he first saw Lopokova dance with Diaghilevs company. When it reopened in 1946, under the auspices of the newly established Arts Council, money ran out before the auditoriums lampshades had been paid for. Women hired as usherettes therefore donated their rationed clothing coupons to buy the fabric. This small sacrifice moved Keynes to tears.

Keynes dies two-thirds of the way through Carters book, which goes on to follow the contested afterlife of his ideas in America. Although Republicans denounced the welfare state as a socialist conspiracy, what John Kenneth Galbraith called reactionary Keynesianism seized on war as the highest form of deficit spending and, rather than diverting funds into something like the NHS, kept the country permanently militarised, poised for campaigns of mass death in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile Keyness dream of making great art and beautiful evenings available to all citizens dwindled into the tacky abundance of the affluent society. Consumption, Keynes declared in 1936, is the sole end and object of all economic activity. What would he have thought of consumerism and the mile-long queues of famished shoppers in car parks when Ikea reopened earlier this month?

In Carters persuasive account, the slippery triangulations of Clinton and Blair are the final betrayal of Keynes: neoliberalism set markets free, unleashed speculators, and opened the way to a globalisation that treated people as disembodied profit maximisers and crammed them into Hillary Clintons basket of deplorables. Finally Carter admits that the Keynesian recipe for peace and prosperity has proved tragically incapable of sustaining democracy. Why did economic losers in the red states allow a demagogue like Trump to rip them off? Why do Tories crave a no-deal Brexit that will impoverish us all?

I do not have satisfying answers, says Carter with a morose shrug, after which he worries that we are blundering back into the moral quagmire that Keynes hoped to avoid. The book ends with an alarming reminder that victories for democracy and equality the end of slavery in the 19th century and the defeat of fascism in the 20th came at the end of a gun.

Keynes rebuffed criticism of his short-run solutions by pointing out: In the long run, we are all dead. True enough, but in the immediate future, as economies stall and societies fray, we may face a fate worse than death. The universe is tottering all over again.

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynesby Zachary D Carter is published by Random House($35)

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The Price of Peace by Zachary D Carter review how liberals betrayed Keynes - The Guardian