“The pompous, almost self-flagellatory, tone which compels us to suffer for our art is sounding increasingly irrelevant. Walk into the Tate’s Turbine Hall and what you will see is young people “hanging out”. That funny word from the cultural explosion that was the 1960s, “happening”, is happening again. And it is happening everywhere: at the National Theatre, whose new director Nicholas Hytner signalled his intent by putting on a blasphemous satire of trash culture; at the National Gallery, which surrounded us with ultra slow-mo videos that had us double taking to detect movement from stillness; at the Royal Opera House, which for the first time admitted a bona fide musical – Sweeney Todd -through its doors. We all felt a little dislocated in 2003.”