As after a violent crime, when detectives set upon the forensic residues of a now absent conflict, we may approach the papers as the scene of a financial trauma and comb their entire surface arrears (a typo - but a symptomatic one which reinforces my argument!) for clues, signs of fiscal stress and its overflow into the collective imagination.

Finally, the pundits of Creative Economies and all that malarkey will be forced to confront their own bastard child: SportArt. Despite the eagerness to strip mine 'creativity' and 'leisure' in an effort to stave off economic doom, the consensual hallucination of a Creative Economy on which it rests is turning more psychedelic than value-producing. While erstwhile 'industry leaders' like super-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist subject themselves to marathon public mea culpas (cf.

Emily Wiczek wonders what really makes People Like Us laugh

‘If there’s any tradition that I’m really proud of, and that I’d love to be interpreted as being part of, it would be one of humour because humour is a form of surrealism and it transcends, and heals, and crosses languages.’

After Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem is one of the more celebrated situationist theorists. This short sketch of a forerunner to the group of which he was once a leading light, says more about Vaneigem’s theoretical weaknesses than it does about his ostensible subject. Vaneigem usefully stresses the specificity of surrealism, concentrating on its differences to dada.