A fter all, it’s not that awful,” The Third Man’s Harry Lime might have concluded after last month’s Tory landslide. “You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for 30 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… 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Now it may not be entirely fair to bring a fictional character into this, nor indeed is it generally accepted that the Swiss invented the cuckoo clock, nor true that the Borgias ruled anything that could be described as “Italy”, or that the Renaissance flourished under the yoke of cruel tyrants (its cradle, Florence, was a republic, later ruled by the Medicis). It’s not even the case that Switzerland, for all its neutrality has managed anything like a half-millennium of peace, but, hey, you get the idea – political turbulence produces great art and radical invention, stability is one long yawn. It’s going to be a hell of a decade!

Well, there is at least some evidence to suggest that may be true. The most divisive period in recent British political history – the Thatcher years – saw direct cultural responses like the rise of illegal raves, anarcho-hippy-environmentalist New Age culture, dystopian comic books such as Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982), searing socially conscious TV such as Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), politicised pop like The Specials’ “Ghost Town” (1981) and Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding” (1982), as well as politicised theatre, such as Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) and Serious Money (1987) and Jim Cartwright’s Road (1986).

But it also produced a colourful array of escapist stage musicals, including Andrew Lloyd Webber’s now almost-forgotten Cats (1981), plus Duran Duran yachting off in pastel suits (1982), and the phenomenon of the Young British Artists, with Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin as the movement’s figureheads, whose entrepreneurial verve ought to have had Thatcher purring. The decade’s most enduring television highlight, Brideshead Revisited (1981), meanwhile, looked wistfully back to a Rees-Mogg-like vision of a world defined by class. Plus, everyone liked The Smiths in the Eighties and look where that ended up. A rush and a push and the land that we stand on is Farage’s.

Compare it with the peaceable Noughties though, and the counterpoints are in reverse. A decade of Coldplay and Snow Patrol, Westlife and Dido was given a shot in the arm by Amy Winehouse and The Libertines and some street smarts by Dizzee Rascal and The Streets. False jeopardy ruled in reality TV creations such as Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! In art, the most notable shift was structural, with the opening of Tate Modern in 2000; its most memorable exhibit was Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, in the radiant presence of which visitors would lie on the floor for an hour at a time basking in its serenity. Well I did, anyway, and fell asleep. Wake me up when the Borgias are back.

The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Show all 25 1 /25 The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade One Direction form (2010) Of Simon Cowell’s many contributions to civilisation – see also Jedward, Susan Boyle and Piers Morgan’s career in America – surely the most enduring will be the alliance of Harry, Niall, Louis, Zayn and… the other one (sorry, hi Liam…we’ve just remembered you). It was during the 2010 run of The X Factor that Cowell decided to assemble a Voltron-like pop behemoth out of five skinny teens slathered in Brylcreem. What followed was the 21st-century version of The Beatles, with better hair, tighter trousers and not a single memorable tune (go on, hum one – we dare you). Getty Images The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade David Fincher releases The Social Network (2010) “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo" went the choral Radiohead cover in the trailer. Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg indeed came across rather slithery in the made-in-dramatist’s heaven collaboration between Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher (with Trent Reznor pitching in on the soundtrack). This account of Facebook’s bro-tastic early years still stands up on its own terms. But it also foreshadows the unease we would later develop towards social media, Big Tech and, yes, the internet itself. Sky The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Ed Sheeran releases "The A-Team" (2011) Years putting up with James Blunt and other, now forgotten, sappy sops had brought the singer-songwriter tradition to a dark and scary place. But then scruffy chap-from-down-the-street Sheeran parachuted in with his mumblecore take on Cat Stevens. He became the first troubadour to headline Wembley and is today the most streamed artist on Spotify. In his wake arrived a horde of Sons of Ed – George Ezra (Ed goes on a gap year), Hozier (Ed forgoes hair-care products), Dermot Kennedy (Ed watches The Commitments too many times), James Bay (Ed refuses to take off his hat) etc. They’re an unstoppable army and have us surrounded. Getty The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade REM split (2011) When the second biggest band of their generation (they never quite snatched the gong from U2) announced they were calling it quits, the world responded with a shrug. A decade on, REM’s relevance has shrunk further (did you care about the recent reissue of Monster?). The cultural baton has passed from rock to pop and the era of the mega band is over. Today, it feels faintly surreal it was ever a thing in the first place. AFP via Getty Images The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade The Avengers is released (2012) Disney accountants…assemble! It was the formula that couldn’t fail – and yet the Avengers nonetheless succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of Marvel and its Mouse Masters (Disney having acquired Marvel in 2009 for $4.24bn). Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow, Hulk and Loki bounded across the screen together – destined to become as iconic to this generation as Luke, Leia, ET and the Ghostbusters were to previous ones. Cinema would never be the same again – to the delight of geeks everywhere and the bafflement of Martin Scorsese and many others. Marvel The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Danny Boyle’s Olympics Opening Ceremony (2012) How at ease with itself and its place in the world Britain seemed. It was the summer of 2012 and the Trainspotting director had fired the starter pistol on the London Olympics with a stunning, yet never vainglorious, celebration of British history and culture. A mere four years on, the Brexit referendum would see the nation tearing itself apart, the exceptionalist strain in the national psyche laid bare. In hindsight, Boyle’s Olympics extravaganza was a vision of a utopian Britishness that never quite existed. Getty The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Disney buys Star Wars (2012) Having swooped in for Marvel, the Magic Kingdom turned its tractor-beam on Lucasfilm. Star Wars was duly sucked into the mothership for a bargain $2.2bn. And then – cue swarming Tie-Fighter noises – came a galaxy of new products. The Force Awakens (2015) was an enjoyable remix of the original Star Wars. But follow-up The Last Jedi crashed and burned having attempted to fix a franchise that wasn’t broken. The next phase of Operation Conquer the Entire Universe was recently put into action with The Mandalorian, the main attraction of the new Disney+ streaming service. Lucasfilm The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade House of Cards debuts (2013) Kevin Spacey snaps a dog’s neck, Robin Wright waxes chilly in glorious trouser-suits. Yes, the first episode of David Fincher’s Netflix thriller had its moments. But House of Cards was far bigger than itself. It was the mega-bucks franchise with which Netflix revealed to the world the sweep of its ambitions. Oceans of content would follow – from retro romp Stranger Things to the (since cancelled) Marvel adaptations, including Dare-Devil and Jessica Jones, and royal rumpus The Crown. The way we watched TV would never be the same again. Sky The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade The Red Wedding in Game of Thrones (2013) Look out…they’re behind you! Actually no, they’re all around you. And now they are stabbing your pregnant wife in the belly… So long Winterfell hero Robb Stark and hello Game of Thrones, cultural juggernaut. With season three’s Red Wedding – the penultimate episode was actually called “The Rains of Castamere” – Game of Thrones adaptors David Benioff and DB Weiss proved themselves masters of subverting expectations. At the time, they must have felt on top of the world. After all, George RR Martin was close to finishing his second-but-last Song of Ice and Fire novel, The Winds of Winter, leaving Benioff and Weiss more than enough time to bring the show to a satisfactory end. What could possibly go wrong? Sky The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade The finale of Breaking Bad (2013) As we try to put the disastrous finale of Game of Thrones behind us, it is comforting to recall those blockbuster shows that concluded on a satisfying note. After five searing seasons, the Ballad of Walter White finished with Bryan Cranston’s chemistry teacher turned meth magnate bleeding out, as his side-kick Jesse drove into the night and Badfinger blared. The perfect end to the great morality play of our age. Sky The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Frozen is released (2013) It is a sign how we have come, and how quickly that, a mere six years ago, a sugar-frosted power ballad about learning to love the real you could be considered vaguely revolutionary, even subversive. But “Let It Go”, the song upon which Frozen coasted to global success, was received as something genuinely ground-breaking by minorities everywhere. Elsa embraced the ice-queen within. And outsiders and outcasts the world over stood up and sang along. It was a big gloopy gummy bear of a tune. Yet it encouraged the downtrodden to find their voice. Sky The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Taylor Swift goes pop (2014) She was already a phenomenon – but the true dawning of the age of Tay-Tay came with “Shake It Off”, her self-referential rumination on fame, self-esteem and finding the courage to love yourself in a world of online hate and anger. Swift was confirmed as the first pop star forged completely in the social media age. Getty The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Gamergate (2014) The existence of a huge hidden army of trolls and extremists drumming in the deep was confirmed during this frightening online hate campaign against females in the video game industry (whether developers, journalists or simply gamers). The controversy would eventually burn itself out. Yet we had been put on notice. The internet might bring people together. It is also a breeding ground for intolerance and paranoia. Getty The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Hamilton debuts on Broadway (2015) A musical about the constitutional underpinnings of the nascent United States, told via the medium of hip hop? It sounded like a spoof from Saturday Night Live, rather than the must-see it became. But Lin-Manuel Miranda was not throwing away his shot – and Hamilton went stellar, on both sides of the Atlantic. Getty The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Love Island is rebooted (2015) Reality TV reached middle age this decade and we looked back at early 2000s Big Brother and wondered at the innocence of it all. Enter ITV’s revamp of the forgotten 2005 series Love Island. Toned singletons were locked down in a Mediterranean villa and encouraged to hook-up and break-up. Questions about the responsibility television producers owed their guinea pigs began to be asked when two former contestants died by suicide. Yet the merry-go-round spun on and indeed gathers speed as we count down to the first winter edition of the series. ITV The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade David Bowie’s death (2016) As T-shirt designers and cover-bands know only too well, rock stars have been passing away for decades. But until recently these deaths were tragic mishaps. The ageing process is the new heroin overdose as the classic rock generation reaches the end of the set-list. Bowie dying in 2016, just three days after the release of incredible final album, Blackstar, was the one that hit many of us hardest. Yet he was merely one among a legion that also included Leonard Cohen, Lemmy from Motorhead, Glenn Frey of the Eagles and The Fall’s Mark E Smith (and yes, this is the first time in recorded history that The Eagles and Mark E Smith have appeared side by side in a sentence). AFP via Getty Images The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade JK Rowling brings back Harry Potter with The Cursed Child (2016) Ten years ago, Harry Potter looked like yesterday’s phenomenon, ready to assume its place on the dusty shelf next to Lord of the Rings and Narnia. But JK Rowling couldn’t resist going back, first with this sprawling play (written by Jack Thorne from a story by Rowling) set partly inside the head of the middle-aged Harry. And then came the wildly uneven Fantastic Beasts films – aka the reason Johnny Depp still has a job. Rowling had started the Quidditch match over, for good or ill. Getty Images The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Apple AirPods are released (2016) Having democratised mp3 players and invented the smart-phone, Apple with its AirPods has introduced the masses to Bluetooth earbuds. The tech went immediately mainstream too. One moment you couldn’t help thinking how silly those free-floating buds looked. The next you were coughing up £200 for a set of your own. Getty The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Sally Rooney publishes Conversations with Friends (2017) Rooney’s debut novel saw her hailed one of those archetypal “voices of a generation”. And she created even bigger tremors with follow-up Normal People (soon to be a BBC adaptation). But what her ascent really proved was that bright-eyed millennials have supplanted middle-aged white male novelists as the sages of the age. What’s Jonathan Franzen been up to lately? Were any of us even aware he published a book (Purity) as recently as 2015? Rex The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Fortnite launches (2017) Video games used to be the new Hollywood, with top titles routinely outperforming big movies. But with Fortnite, they became the new rock’n’roll, surging through the blood-stream of youth culture. Where once kids worshipped pop stars and footballers, now their imagination is dominated by candy-coloured combatants jumping off cliffs and sneak stabbing one another in the virtual kidneys. Fortnite has sent an entire generation weak at the knees. AFP via Getty Images The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Harvey Weinstein is disgraced (2017) Just two years on #MeToo has brought about unimaginable change, at least in the entertainment industry. And it began with a New York Times report unmasking the power-broker producer as a brutal predator. The film world was turned upside down, reputation after reputation demolished. Yet how far have the shock-waves truly travelled? #MeToo has never seriously troubled the music industry. And out in the real world, many women remain at the mercy of men like Weinstein. Getty The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Billie Eilish achieves one billion streams on Spotify without releasing an album (2018) Fours years on from Taylor Swift and “Shake It Off”, pop music was about to be reinvented all over again. Influenced by Nine Inch Nails as much as by The Neptunes, Billie O’Connell and her brother Finneas have pulled pop into a dark, nightmarish never-land. And we can’t have enough of it. The impact is comparable to that of Nirvana on rock, when hair metal was rendered suddenly irrelevant. Poison and Mötley Crüe in this scenario are Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and their contemporaries. Getty Images for Coachella The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Kanye West visits the White House (2018) The Kanye psychodrama has been must-see viewing since he rushed Taylor Swift at the 2009 VMAs. But now came a moment for the history books as an egotistical eccentric with ludicrous dress sense… met Kanye West (should that be the other way around?). Getty Images The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Stormzy headlines Glastonbury (2019) Grime was already far too successful for us to entertain the idea that it “came of age” when Stormzy, in his Banksy stab-vest, closed Friday night at Glastonbury. But this was nonetheless a headline moment as the artist brought his state-of-the-nation lyrics and beats to the ultimate stage. Getty The 25 biggest cultural moments of the decade Phoebe Waller-Bridge signs a $20m deal with Amazon (2019) Traditional television is the past, streaming the future. And in this global market-place what chance have state broadcasters such as the BBC? Not much, it was confirmed as Phoebe Waller-Bridge followed her triumphant second season of Fleabag by inking a $20m exclusivity deal with Amazon. Streaming, it was made painfully clear, is the Champions League of telly. State broadcasting is meanwhile on its way to becoming whatever they call the Vauxhall Conference nowadays. AFP via Getty Images

Does the argument truly stand up, though? You could make a case that the single most important art work of the 20th century was Malevich’s Black Square (2015), the “zero point of painting”, which came out of the turbulent period (and world war) that led up to the Russian Revolution, but you could equally say it was John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), which was conceived in the bright, positive glow of American victory in the Second World War. It’s probable that the century’s most influential artist was not Picasso, whose Guernica (1937) was made in response to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, but Andy Warhol, who was obsessed with consumerism, celebrity and fame.

The American Sixties make a stronger case for the power of expression in tumultuous times. Atomic annihilation loomed as the Cold War gripped, and the US became fatally mired in the Vietnam War, just as conflict erupted at home with the civil rights struggle. Television brought the bloodshed into the living rooms of millions, as a counterculture formed. Dylan set protest to guitars acoustic and electric, The Doors’ Jim Morrison sang of “a desperate land” in “The End” (1967), intoning the exculpatory mantra, “The west is the best, the west is the best. Get here, and we’ll do the rest” (or maybe he was just singing about California). Performance art, such as Yayoi Kusama’s naked flag burning on Brooklyn Bridge (1968), appalled the passers-by, and environmentalism reared its head in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the climate fiction of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965).

Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (Creative Commons)

Drug culture also made its presence felt in the decade and has infected everything since. But was Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) ultimately more significant than Philip K Dick’s novel from the same year, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I don’t think so. The decade was bracketed by Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).

Oppression is undeniably a powerful creative engine. The African-American experience has birthed entirely new musical forms, gospel, blues, jazz and rock’n’roll, as well as hip-hop. The period when the latter was gestating in the Seventies block parties of the New York City projects, undisturbed by A&R men and market forces, was surely its most important. (The suspicion now is that anything vaguely new would be strangled in the act of emerging by the rush to herald it, market it and monetise it.) Hip-hop, fully grown, could give voice to pretty much any emotion, including deep and abiding anger – “and we hate po-po, wanna kill us dead in the street for sure...” as Kendrick Lamar put it in 2015; “Here is a land that never gave a damn about a brother like me,” in the words of Public Enemy in 1988.

In the UK, the garage scene mutated into grime, which has a similar articulacy. Rage has been a potent artistic drive in other contexts, too. In Seventies Belfast, at the height of the Troubles, Stiff Little Fingers lashed out in all directions, especially at the sectarian paramilitaries that drew young people in to die “for their important cause” – “Stuff their f***ing armies”, sang Jake Burns, “killing isn’t my idea of fun.”

There are warning signs aplenty, though, that anger and hatred may turn out to be the dominant emotions of the 2020s, which suggests that any artistic response employing them isn’t going to help. We’ve just lived through a decade in which it became clear that rage is easy to trigger via mass and social media. Activating the body’s biochemistry to foment fury has become as exploitable as putting “jumps” into horror movies to flood the body with fight or flight chemicals to intensify fear. Horror, porn and hatred are all biochemical events.

Getting people angry has become the go-to tactic of the press and political demagogues, knowing that anger holds the attention and can be directed to effect change. It worked on the people in the nation with the best deal in the European Union – oh, that was us – and it can work on the people with the most admired public service broadcaster in the world. Someone in a room somewhere is probably thinking of a “doing word” right now for a three-word slogan that makes it seem we can all “achieve” something by dismantling the BBC. Watch those attacks keep rolling in. And we are all susceptible to manipulation.

Banksy sells for over $1m then immediately self-destructs

So maybe not the return of punk rock and shock art, but I’m not pretending to know what the decade will look and sound like. Art and politics have already been interacting in surprising ways in the 2010s. Artists such as Chris, formerly Christine and the Queens, have made pop a radical art form, while the most visible UK political artist of the era, Banksy, is not even considered enough of an artist to get a Turner Prize nomination (though surely worth one for the self-destroying painting, Love is in the Bin, alone). Television has struggled with social consciousness – as audiences switch off at the first whiff of being preached at – but we’re in a golden age of reactive theatre, where directors and writers are challenging everything from blame culture to the criminal justice system.