What do you do when you're an 18th Century court painter in service of an elite class that seems to be speedily going to hell in a handcart?If you're Francisco de Goya, you keep your eye on the prize; you keep painting, and you keep your thoughts to yourself.In the late 1700s, Spain's upper classes were hurtling out of control all around Goya. The centrifugal force of Catholicism, which held together the otherwise wildly divided social classes, had itself become a force of division in the grips of the Inquisition.The moneyed political classes lapsed into corrupt excess, a million miles away from artist El Greco's elongated, ascetic Spaniards two hundred years before.The lower classes were ravaged by war and poverty. In Goya's own words: ''Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters."HORROR SHOW: 'Los Caprichos' by Francisco de GoyaIn a series of 80 etchings titled Los Caprichos (the Caprices, or the Whims), Goya gave vent to his private thoughts on the follies of his countrymen, exposing these impossible monsters, giving flesh and bone to the unseen forces that dictated Spanish life in such a dramatic fashion.Johannesburg's Turbine Art Fair, this year on its fourth run, allows art buyers an opportunity to purchase great work by established and emerging artists at reasonable prices. The Fair has set a price limit of R40000 on all work.But it's not all hard-sell: the programme of exhibitions and art talks this year ensures that the event educates visitors while providing a commercial platform for smaller galleries and art consultancies.At the heart of it all is There Is Only Light and Shadow, an exhibition which sees the genius pairing of a sample from Goya's series with a related set of works by South African contemporary artist Diane Victor, from her The Disasters of Peace series of etchings. Both are taken from the Johannesburg Art Gallery's permanent collection, and the show is curated by the gallery's Musha Nehluleni.Victor's series (she adds works whenever she spots dirty laundry that needs airing) began in 2001, precisely when the Rainbow Nation's lustre began to wane.Depicting the host of social ills we know all too well from the media, Victor's small, highly detailed works deal with rape, domestic violence, corruption, and nationalism gone awry. The series shows that, despite avoiding a civil war similar to the one Spain tumbled into in the early 19th Century, we have all the hallmarks of a society ripping itself apart.Victor's acerbic work is seminal in South African art because it holds up a mirror to a peacetime society that often looks, to the casual observer, like a society at war with itself. It is the antidote to the blind optimism which we perfected in a bid to forget our awful past.Goya's secretive works (he withdrew them from publication a year after their release due to controversy) aimed to do a similar thing: highlight the dangers of rampant nationalism when mixed with superstition and anti-intellectualism.Says Nehuleni: ''Although created centuries (and continents) apart, these bodies of work speak to each other on a level that shows that, while times have changed, societies today are still shaped by the same trials and artists are still grappling with these issues."Catch Christopher Till, Director of the Apartheid Museum and Musha Neluheni in conversation about the exhibition 'Francisco Goya & Diane Victor: There is Only Light and Shadow', on Saturday from 11am to 12am at the Turbine Art Fair...