Do our cultural institutions need to change their ‘political tone’? | thearticle

“Trustee by trustee, chair by chair, the government is changing the political tone at the top of Britain’s national bodies, from museums to regulators,” wrote Robert Booth in Sunday’s

_Observer_. He resumes, “The latest crop of appointments are whiter and more male than before, but another growing concern is about ministers pushing the boundaries of acceptable norms by

using political appointments to cement their party’s positions on issues ranging from the reappraisal of Britain’s colonial past to freedom of speech on university campuses.” There is

another way of looking at this. Read Michael Prodger’s excoriating attack in this week’s _New Statesman_ on the politically correct wall labels at the Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain,

consider the David Miller case at Bristol University or the anti-Semitism controversy at the Royal Court theatre and ask if “the political tone at the top of Britain’s national bodies”

doesn’t need change. Michael Prodger launched a formidable broadside against the political correctness at the Tate’s Hogarth exhibition. “[T]he exhibition co-opted the paintings into an

indictment of slavery, colonial exploitation, racism, sexual violence and general moral fecklessness,” he writes. The signage “quickly becomes insufferable”. Prodger isn’t the only leading

art critic to take exception to this “shallow and ahistorical editorialising”. Waldemar Januszczak was just as forthright: “Just to be clear, there’s lots of marvellous art in Tate Britain’s

Hogarth show. What’s gone wrong is the curation. Structurally it’s a complete mess. And the drivel in the captions is an insult to scholarship.” Then there was the Philip Guston exhibition

at the National Gallery. Or rather, there wasn’t. This was supposed to be part of a major retrospective, organised together with several leading American art museums. It was postponed

because the National Gallery and their partners were afraid that visitors and sponsors might think that Guston’s famous satirical depictions of members of the Ku Klux Klan might be mistaken

for ringing endorsements. They ran scared and the exhibition now won’t be seen till 2022. The obvious question is how could museum curators think that anyone would be offended by drawings

and paintings that depict the Ku Klux Klan, riding in cars, working at easels, smoking, when, as his daughter argued, these images “unveil white culpability, our shared role in allowing the

racist terror that [Guston] had witnessed since boyhood, when the Klan marched openly by the thousands in the streets of Los Angeles”? Then there’s this week’s PR disaster at the Royal

Court. A new play has a hugely wealthy villain called Hershel Fink. There was an immediate outcry, mainly from Jews. How did the Court allow a wealthy villain to have such an obviously

Jewish name? The Court issued an apology — of sorts. “[T]here is no reference to [the character] being Jewish in the play,” they announced. Except, of course, that the character is called

Hershel Fink, the most Jewish name possible. Then came another apology: “The dialogue will help us reflect on the process that enabled the name to remain and what is missing in our systems

that would have mitigated this unnecessary harm.” This is just hopeless. It’s a matter of basic sensitivity, not “systems” and not “process”. How could it be that no one at the Royal Court

noticed this? Not the playwright, not the director, not the actors? It is unthinkable that this could have happened with a character with an obviously African or Asian name. But a Jewish

name? Of course. Almost forty years ago, the Royal Court commissioned a play by the leftist Jim Allen, to be directed by the leftist Ken Loach, about how eminent Hungarian Jews collaborated

with the Nazis to organise their escape while half a million other Hungarian Jews were to be murdered. I should declare an interest here. I was asked by Channel 4 to report on whether the

play might be seen as offensive. I said it stank and that Channel 4 should not go near it. They didn’t, but by then the Royal Court were up to their necks in an even worse PR disaster than

Fink-gate. “My take on the Royal Court [Hershel Fink] issue?” wrote Professor Keith Kahn-Harris, a leading British writer on anti-Semitism. “So ingrained has denial of anti-Semitism become

that even the most straightforwardly anti-Semitic tropes become invisible.” Then there is the state of some of our universities. The appalling treatment of Professor Kathleen Stock at

Sussex. The failure of Bristol University to handle the case of Professor David Miller, accused of anti-Semitism by Jewish students at the university. Not only did Bristol drag their feet

over the Miller affair, they failed to take any action against those colleagues of his who signed a petition defending Miller against accusations of anti-Semitism. This weekend, several

national newspapers have run a story about two Oxford colleges which accepted large sums of money from a trust set up by the late Max Mosley. Professor Lawrence Goldman, emeritus fellow in

history at St Peter’s College, told Sky News that Mosley had never apologised for supporting his father’s fascist and anti-Semitic movement, which made the donations “tainted and dirty

money”. Goldman said the donations would be better going “to the communities who were terrorised and beaten up by [Oswald] Mosley and his thugs twice in the 20th century… in the 1930s and

the early 1960s.” Back to Robert Booth’s article in the _Observer_, criticising all these white, male appointments by the Government. Is that the real problem? Or is it that leading art

museums, theatres and universities do not seem to be able to deal with racism and anti-Semitism, or with “no platforming” and harassment by students. Or is it that the heads of our artistic

institutions run scared at the very thought of offending anyone rather than standing up for one of the great artists of the late 20th century? Since these cultural institutions can’t sort

out their own “political tone”, who should?