Lessons in History volume II - Democracy An exhibition of artists' books and multiples on the theme above

‘…in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949) Graham Green’s character expresses contempt for democracy in stark contrast to our sense of ‘democracy’ as a ‘feel-good’ idea. With missionary zeal, we have undertaken wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in part to bring a western ‘democratic system’ to the citizens of these countries. But is the ‘democracy’ we wish to impose already broken? Will the cuckoo clock be all that is left?