This quote (from loser She-Hulk actor Tatiana Maslany) sums up the sheer contempt that a lot of people working in creative arts today have towards their respective mediums, seeing them as platforms for espousing their politics without any thought about creating something everlasting, beautiful or compelling.
It’s all about relevancy these days and the notion of things being "relevant/irrelevant" (boke) fucks me off. To simply dismiss something because it’s not in fashion/doesn’t line up with the current school of thought/isn’t commercially viable is not just the act of a dunderhead, it’s a confession that those doing the dismissal cannot process anything for themselves and need explicit approval from others to enjoy art.
This attitude has been evident for the last 25 years but it’s only since the mid-2010's where politics really began to equal relevancy. Be it climate change, Trump, Brexit, Covid, Ukraine, Gaza, if artists weren’t in line with the prevailing narrative (or worse, didn’t comment on politics at all) then they were in trouble.
It’s not sustainable, and this timely book from Alexandra Wilson offers us common sense on the topic.
Describing the current landscape, she paints a bleak picture:
We read of curators castigating the very art works they have been charged with looking after for historic sins. We hear of arts festivals being boycotted, either for platforming speakers/ artists of whom other speakers/artists disapprove of, or for taking money from sponsors whose investments are deemed to have failed a strict purity test...artistic spaces have become political battlegrounds, with theatres, concert halls and galleries now the go-to forum for protests about everything from distant war to climate change. What is going on?
Underpinning a now widespread insistence that the arts must constantly attend to politics is the notion that ‘everything is political’. This is an idea with its roots in academic theory, which has entered the mainstream conversation over the last decade. It is voiced not only by outspoken people with a drum to bang on social media or by journalists touting for clicks but also, in some cases, by the very people who run our arts institutions, as the arts find themselves at a strange intersection between managerial bureaucracy and progressive activism. There is no coordinated campaign, yet it is a way of thinking that has taken grip extremely widely in a short space of time.
Throughout the book, Wilson tackles issues related to a self-loathing arts sector that cannot argue for its existence, condescending approaches to the ordinary person, classic works being used as a springboard for the latest fashionable cause and a defence of art for art’s sake.
It’s a worthy topic and Wilson does a fine job in demonstrating how officials perpetuate the idea that art is an elitist hobby in order to try and make it more appealing to the masses by dumbing it down. It’s a genuinely maddening cycle of self-perpetuation. Crucially, she never makes a claim that all art must be devoted to the rehabilitation of the soul but that there should be room for both.
Although not the definitive take on the subject, it’s still a passionate polemic that should be used as a conversation starter when it comes to these issues.
Alexandra Wilson, 2026, Culture Vultures: When Activism Meets the Arts. Polity Books. ISBN: 978-1509571956
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.
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