Art delights, consoles, intrigues, challenges, reveals. Sometimes, especially in times of cultural vacuity and greed, art smarts.

When art smarts, the philistines man the ramparts of censorship and denigration. "Filth!" "My child paints better than that!"

What closed and narrow minds fail to see is that art is both a thermometer and a barometer of culture, registering the health or unhealth of that ungainly creature and also hinting at things to come. It is not the art (or of course the artists) that is diseased. It’s the culture.

The mess that art got itself into during the twentieth century was symptomatic of the mess that culture had got itself into: a hypocritical concealed and denied culture of violence, a century of wars and revolutions labeled "just" and "holy" and fought with ever-increasing destructiveness. It’s no accident that within months after Stravinsky had sent the good burgers of Paris howling out of the theater with the wild dissonances and rhythms of Rite of Spring, Europe descended into the pits of hell and a blood-letting such as the world had never seen.

We are still too close to that awful century (and ourselves too much infected by the culture of violence) to see clearly what was going on, how we got to such a place of cyclical and merciless terror.

What we can already do is step back and look at the whole panoply of twentieth century art. It begins for real in that Paris opera house in 1913, and it ends, as Robert Hughes has observed, in 1970 with Mark Rothko's fourteen final paintings in the Rothko Chapel.

The rest, what came after 1970, was mere esthetic sophistry and commodification: art as whore to Late Capitalism.

The artists did not laugh all the way to the bank. They screamed. Partly for what the culture was doing to them, partly for what they were doing to the culture, but mostly for the horror the culture concealed beneath its seductive surface of growing affluence and ease.

Through the last half of the century children and parents slept mostly without nightmares on a planet where billions still starved, a planet whose delicate balance of life-support was being destroyed by human pollutants, a planet pockmarked by the shallow graves of 60,000 nuclear warheads.

More than blind hypocrisy, the situation was (and is) truly crazy-making.

The British film-maker Derek Jarman was one of the artists who tried to make some kind of visual sense of the deep and dangerous cognitive dissonance which defined life in the twentieth century. In his last film, Blue, he threw up his hands, put a blue screen in front of the movie goer and spoke apocalyptic words on the soundtrack.

Before that desperate valedictory, he made one last visual foray: The Last of England. In a wasteland of desolate and ruined buildings, humans try to art but the only art that comes is a jagged and jerky condensate of images in the vast charnel house which the twentieth century itself tried so hard to deny it was constructing.

In the chaos of violent and imminent death, Jarman pulls off one of the great, indeilble images of cinema: For what seems like endless minutes, a mute figure tries to fuck a large reproduction of Caravaggio’s Amor Vincet.

Whatever shallow remarks the shallow-minded make about such behavior, the sequence is us, still, wandering willy-nilly in twilight toward the nuclear fall of night.

"You must be what you wish to see in the world," Gandhi said. Having been seduced by the great human lie of the peaceful and affluent surface of modern civilization, we remain blind to our repeated, worsening outbursts of violence.