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A huge swirl of whipped cream, garnished with a drone, a fly, and a maraschino cherry: so insistent that I avert my eyes on purpose, like how I won’t look at strangers revving the engines of bright convertibles Still, each time I circle the traffic-choked drain of Trafalgar Square on my bicycle, I can’t avoid it It squirts into my consciousness an airy sugar, a heady fume   Heather Phillipson’s The End (2020) is the Fourth Plinth’s latest topping; since 1998, the public art project has invited contemporary artists to respond to the square and its monuments The project has resulted in a number of meditations on imperialism, such as Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) and Michael Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2019), as well as middle fingers to the patriarchy, as with Katharina Fritsch’s giant blue Hahn/Cock (2011) Hans Haacke’s skeletal, riderless Gift Horse (2015), its front legs wrapped in stock market ticker-tape, embodied the vulture-pecked wealth of the city’s dead centre Invoking themes of surveillance and empty excess, Phillipson doesn’t break from this cynical tradition The piece was conceived and commissioned in 2016, the year that finally dug the grave of American exceptionalism with Donald Trump’s election, and of the European project with the Brexit referendum; the year that Phillipson says she ‘lost her sense of humour’ to despair Hence the titular fatalism of The End, in spite of its ludicrously pop encasement 2020’s cascading disasters, and the attendant strain placed on public consensus and societal cohesion, have only clarified Phillipson’s worst instincts, turning The End into a portent of a precarious era   Phillipson initially planned The End for Trafalgar Square’s everyday atmosphere of touristic fantasy and formalised dissent, intending instant pleasure with a top note of subversion But on March 16 — the eve of the first nationwide lockdown, coinciding with The End’s scheduled unveiling — the square’s protesters, buskers, tourists, and gaggles of teens evaporated as