To live at someone else’s expense

Robert James paints a useful picture of the art world in TCW.

How art has been turned into a woke battering ram

Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism, by Alexander Adams; Imprint-Academic, August 2022; £14.95, available here.

LIKE the poor, revolutionaries will always be with us, so it behoves those of us who wish to conserve the best that has been said, thought and created to understand the scale of the threat posed to museums and galleries today. Alexander Adams’s forensic examination of the problem is a very useful guide.

The term ‘artivism’ means political propaganda masquerading as art. ‘Artists’ receive funding from ‘cultural entryist’ museum directors, who have politically captured the institutions they run, then launch some ‘installation’, ‘hub’ or ‘happening’. As Adams acutely observes, this ‘art’ is left-wing without exception.

The piece is quite short and well worth reading because the problem is much wider than the art world.

What can be done? Adams is somewhat circumspect about this, losing himself in doubt about the elites’ ultimate motivations. For me, the broad answer is simple: turn off the money tap; axe the Arts Council and turn over arts funding for our major museums, galleries and orchestras to a ministerial department. That is not perfect but would at least raise the possibility of kicking out the parasite ‘artivists’ – for a while.

How you keep woke out of museum management is a more difficult problem. As Adams notes, museums and galleries have always been vulnerable to capture by the radical middle classes, whose aim is to live at someone else’s expense.

The last sentence applies all over the place. Many publicly-funded activities are vulnerable to capture by the radical middle classes, whose aim is to live at someone else’s expense. Hence the BBC, climate change, Net Zero, sustainability, dodgy charities and the mess we are in now.