Conversation

"When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king, the palace becomes a circus." (some street art)

Or maybe... the palace is just returning to its original form?

According to some anthropologists, the court essentially began as a circus, a "theatre state" as Clifford Geertz termed it. Which must of course be a very ambigous and possibly terrible thing. I think that Graeber & Wengrow's "The dawn of everything" has some brief but nuanced thoughts on that point.