The key to the collapse of our cultural self-confidence

IN 2019 RACHEL WHITEREAD was made Dame of the British Empire “for services to art”. Since her “art” consists in making casts of the interior of everyday objects (the underside of a chair, a room or, most famously, an entire about-to-be-demolished house) her honour is one of those moments — up there with Kissinger’s Peace Prize or Caligula’s supposed appointment of his horse Incitatus as consul — when satire dies.

But Whiteread’s damehood is worth more than a world-weary shrug. Instead, properly anatomised, it helps explain one of the most important and yet most mysterious phenomena of our tortured age. Why, at the very moment of the triumph of the West — “The End of History” in Fukuyama’s magnificently hubristic formulation — has there been such a