Abstract

A lot can be learned about a culture by observing how it deals with the underside of life—with all those things it decides, for whatever reason, are unacceptable or beyod the pale.

Every society, like every individual, holds up an image of what it thinks it is, but this is never the whole of what it actually its. Underneath the façade, in the interstices of social life and in the hidden spaces still considered taboo, one can often find the key to understanding the official world of surfaces. Toulouse-Lautrec understood this when he chose to paint the demimonde of Paris, calling it a “mirror of the bad dreams of contemporary society.”