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Groups like the LGB Alliance are considered beyond the pale in some circles. (Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images)
Arts Council England (ACE) is an organisation that cares — and you can tell what it cares about by searching through the hundreds of documents on its website. Diversity, racism and inclusion; class and disability; the environment and the climate crisis. There are tens of thousands of words outlining the thinking that grants access to its half a billion-pound budget. If you want ACE’s money, you’d better convince it that you care about the same things, in the same way.
However, the flip-side is that there are some issues that ACE seems not to care about — like free expression. ACE now warns funded organisations that it will “monitor… artistic and creative output that might be deemed controversial” and requires them to consider “the views and perceptions of different stakeholders, including their appetite for risk”. On the next page of the guidance, there’s the threat of sanctions — from “increased monitoring” to “withdrawal of funding”. This is an object lesson in how to have a chilling effect on culture in Britain. The announcement by Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer this month of a full-scale independent review into the organisation is welcome; the Arts Council’s role in limiting artistic freedom must be examined.
The review could highlight the poor treatment of dozens of artists. In 2022, for instance, the gender-critical ceramicist Claudia Clare was invited to exhibit at ACE-funded Burgh House, Hampstead — only for her exhibition to later be cancelled. The director of Burgh House, Mark Francis, emailed Clare to explain: “We respect the rights of individuals to hold their own beliefs, but once these have been made public by an individual, we must consider all stakeholders in the charity and their rights to feel included and safe.” This is ACE’s approach to free expression in action.
While freelancers who work in the arts are often unwilling to go on the record about their experiences, for fear of losing work, Clare is far from alone. A number of programming staff at a major ACE-funded organisation recently described to me how they were investigated by its HR department after inviting a gender-critical artist to speak. Their jobs are now in doubt because they “exposed audiences to dangerous ideas”. Similarly, a dance company’s tour was cancelled in 2023 after several venues realised the production contained gender-critical feminist content. The people concerned don’t want to risk further damage to their careers by being quoted here.
The same hostility can be traced back to the Arts Council itself. In June last year, Denise Fahmy, an ACE employee of more than 15 years, won a harassment claim against the body. (She has co-founded Freedom in the Arts with choreographer Rosie Kay.) Her case related to another labyrinthine arm of bureaucracy, the London Community Fund, which had awarded an ACE grant — later suspended — to the gender-critical group LGB Alliance. After an internal meeting in which Fahmy was the only person to challenge the view that the LGB Alliance is anti-trans, colleagues circulated a petition which condemned “discriminatory transphobic staff” and claimed the LGB Alliance had links to “neo-Nazis, homophobes and Islamaphobes [sic]”. When she won the case, Fahmy said: “People in the arts, and especially women, are facing a tide of bullying with spurious accusations of transphobia… I hope my case has woken up leaders in the arts as to what’s going on.”
It’s certainly a shift from ACE’s early vision. When I first started working in the subsidised arts in 1996, ACE modestly described itself as “the key funding body for the arts”. And this was in keeping with its founding principles, dreamed up in the post-war moment of cultural democratisation. Growing out of the wartime Committee for Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the Arts Council was established by Royal Charter in 1946 to “develop and improve knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts”, and to spread them as widely as possible throughout the country. John Maynard Keynes chaired both CEMA and the new body, and his vision of great art for everyone remained unchallenged for 60 years.
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SubscribeBack in the early 2000s I applied for and received Arts Council funding. Getting funding had little to do with artistic merit and much to do with cracking the code to the words ACE wanted to hear. My initial application was rejected after which they offered to take me through my application to explain why. They gave me the outline of the application I should have given them. This I did, and funding I received. I immediately booked flights to go on holiday. The ACE money wasn’t really needed, I just thought it worth a try to see if I could get any out of them. Turned out I could.
A few months afterwards they asked me to appear at some showcase along with other successful applicants from that years’ crop. The showcase was a tax payer funded knees up/day out for a couple of hundred staff of several funding bodies. They all chatted with each other, and occasionally talked to the artists. One woman said I talked with said she worked for an “umbrella organisation” I asked what one of those does? She said “It keeps a roof over my head.”
We were then treated to a display by a rather inept and under rehearsed dance company, which comprised of several people I knew from the artier pubs I drank in – none of them were dancers by training or profession, but all were adept at filling in ACE applications. The pissed up crowd of ACE staff sat glassy eyed waiting for it to end so they could go back to swapping cards and eating nibbles.
Walking around the other stalls I chatted with the artists to see what was being funded. As far as I could see, there were few people with any obvious talent. Those who did have it clearly didn’t need funding. They produced high quality work people wanted to buy at a price the artist could live off. Myself included. There were many artists clearly making mediocre work that no one wanted to buy at any price. All funding was doing was perpetuating their artistic delusions at the tax payers expense.
But this well be preferable to today – as the author suggests. ACE is now staffed by younger more ideologically driven people. Who no longer see the ACE simply as a way to line their own pockets but to change the arts themselves to present the world in the way they wish it to be. I recently was introduced to a woman who had just finished a Masters in “Craftivism.” Yes, with an interest in the arts, but with no obvious talent, unable to make a living from making things, she has decided to make a living making trouble for anyone who is capable but who falls short of her political ideals.
Many years ago New Zealand did away with all farming subsidies. A brave and risky thing to do given the nature of New Zealand farming and its distance from all markets. Yet New Zealand farming not only survived, it prospered.
Perhaps it’s time we tried a similar experiment with the arts.
The howls of outrage can only be imagined were there to be an AXE taken to ACE.
“You’re killing the arts!” “You’re destroying creativity!” “Barbarians!”
Anyone with skin in the game understands what ACE is about, and steadfastly gets on with producing their own thing whilst staying well clear of the cloying mits of this particular quango.
It’s about something more than just talent – independence: of mind, of spirit.
Absolutely. If no-one wants to use their own money to pay for your work, it’s unlikely to be any good.
Yes, scrap the ACE and the quality of cultural output would immediately improve. The Beatles achieved what they did because they paid the dues – 250 nights in grotty German nightclubs. Had they had access to government subsidy they’d never have improved on Love Me Do or developed such astonishing performance skills.
Academic funding councils are exactly the same – in the UK and Canada.
In the current climate I am somewhat ashamed of my dual UK/Canadian citizenship.
Fellow half-Canadian here. No need to be ashamed eh! Or what nationalities would you “trade up” for?
So you’re saying you are proud of Justin Trudeau, the love child of Fidel Castro?
Are you proud of all your cheap shots, including that one?
How about all the fellow Americans (I’m one since birth) you seem to hate?
“Be good to yourself, and others” –Jerry Springer
*I don’t admire or take pride in Trudeau, but are you ashamed to be American based on the election of presidents you dislike or can’t stand? I’m not. I remain a proud enough if worried U.S citizen, however the country, Congress, or White House tilts.
Ask yourself if you’re not too delicate for the rough and tumble. There is no shame in that.
What a punk ass reply.
I can be mouthy and pretentious, but I ain’t delicate buddy.
I’m in the same boat. It’s quite disturbing actually. I can’t decide which establishment elite is worse
Great little vignette. With your sharp eye and candid pen, I hope you’re still hitting the real or figurative canvas in some way. Any relation to E.M., author of A Passage to India?
Yes, I still make things for a living. No relation to E.M.
Rather than completely doing away with support for the arts, perhaps a major overhaul of the bureaucracy with all the power.
Given the way useful organisations inevitably get captured by ideologues and bureaucrats after a few years, perhaps funding should only last for a number of years after which it is stopped, and something new done with it.
I’ve not seen many examples of this happening or working. When I say “many”, I mean “any”.
It would truly be a fascinating artistic and social experiment to see what happened if the state money tap was turned off. Whose lives would be effected? And in what way? For better or for worse?
Agree completely
What kind of art do you do ? Mime would be great . Then you’d always have your writing to fall back on .
We are ruled over by people who hate and despise us, even while they leech of us. Spiteful parasites.
It doesn’t just prop up the untalented.. it’s fully signed up to paying the salaries of the enemy within, because: diversity https://www.thejc.com/news/poetry-house-that-gets-100k-grant-backed-palestinian-liberation-in-wake-of-hamas-terror-aenqi4s7
This is problem with the west today – throw gobs of govt money around and nothing gets done. It’s really a jobs program for over educated, under skilled snowflakes. Very discouraging.
And perhaps this is why we are overtaxed and government seems ‘to big’!
All this tier of quangos is, is a way of employing children from middle class families who are too thick to get into the Civil Service.
The ACE would do well to remember that its annual budget is provided by every single tax payer in the country. It is not their money it is our money.
The ACE should not have any kind of political agenda. It should remain entirely neutral politically, like every other organisation that is, in whole or in part, taxpayer funded.
If it’s to be of value it should concentrate on help little amateur productions in obscure towns.
Nice try, but groups like this not only see the money as theirs, they’ve come to believe that the taxpayer works for them, not the other way around. This is especially pronounced within govt, which long since traded in public service for self-service.
It helps when you can vote yourself a paycheque.
But pretty much every government appointed agency has given itself a political remit these days, it’s not just ACE.
Even the Financial Conduct Authority, universally derided for its utter uselessness by the entire financial services industry, has decided it needs to police ‘sexism in the workplace’. The financial companies forced to fund its existence would rather it just tried to do what it was actually set up for.
We are just sheep being sheared as far as these marxist captured institutions are concerned. When there is no more fleece to give, then Lord help us.
The problem with state sponsorship of the arts is that what you get is state sponsored art.
Yet without it, you get marketing’s ‘if it worked once, beat it to death,’ philosoply resulting in book and movie mills cranking out safe and predictable books and endless remakes and franchise films. The answer is some government funding based solely on ability and vision, never moral merit.
If all the past art is ‘marketing’; then lets get back to marketing.
What has trans politics got to do with supporting British Culture? That’s the subheading. The answer is : NOTHING. There are ways to do something for the talent and culture of this country that don’t involve mischievous/divisive politics. Or sponsoring performance art that includes such activities as ‘demystifying the a**s’ and ‘butt plugs’.(The event was subtitled ‘Tempting Failure’ and its artistic director was Dr Thomas John Bacon of Middlesex University. )Congrats, taxpayers.
In our retirement we started holding outdoor exhibitions in our garden and small woodlands. The idea was to promote grass roots British artists and provide affordable garden art for the everyday person who hasn’t got thousands to spend but doesn’t like the green glass eyes in the garden centre offerings. The exhibition is now in its fifteenth year with an average of eighty exhibitors and two hundred or more pieces carefully sited on plinths, integrated into the borders or as view stoppers when big/bold enough. Each artist gets to discuss their personal positionings when they come to set up. The exhibition is non-profit, we take just enough commission to cover some help in the garden and we do not charge visitors an admission fee. It’s open for six weeks in the early summer and thousands and thousands of people visit. It’s a locally listed tourist attraction, garden clubs arrange evening visits with a talk, schools bring children, psychologists and life coaches host evening ‘workshops’ which are billed as ‘Journeys of self discovery that are Sparked by Art’.
Artists whose first piece was shown here have grown and gone on to become professionals who get public commissions. There’s work in stone, ceramic, glass, bronze, cast resin, metalwork, all original work or, for those who cast, limited editions. Sales are healthy.
Our idea of a safe space is the odd handrail, clean loos, plants that stop you from falling in the pond, shady benches for rests en route and, since COVID, hygienically wrapped cake and paper cups – not as nice as china mugs and homemade but that’s viruses for you.
None of the artists ever mention any political agenda, though some are gay etc. The Arts Council, when it comes up, which is rarely, is never spoken of fondly.
Unlike those involved in ‘Tempting Failure’, we are not pioneers and plenty of others round Britain do similar things. We liase with some, and pass on our artist list to help new exhibitions get started. After all, we don’t have that many years left in us and British art and culture have to go on – through the efforts of grass roots people who feel it, care for it and live it. I suspect that that doesn’t include ACE.
Indeed.
SEE ALSO: Various government departments including Education and the NHS, along with countless universities, retail chains, banks / building societies, regional police and fire services etc., all of whom pay what amounts to blackmail money to Stonewall in order to appear as near the top as as possible on their lists of ‘inclusive’ (for which read ‘compliant and otherwise well-behaved’) employers.
The sooner this brazen corruption is dismantled, the sooner we can get back to a meaningful and practical understanding of what it means to live in a culture in which believers are free to practise their various belief systems, but not free to insist that everybody else must practise them too.
This form of words “we must consider all stakeholders … and their rights to feel included and safe.”, or a variation thereof, are trotted out whenever the wokerati take control of yet another civic institution. I would get short shrift if I complained about not feeling “included”. I tick none of their boxes.
O for those idyllic Enid Blyton days when ACE stood for the Atlantic Coast Express!
Departing from Waterloo at 11.00, and arriving at the ‘end of the known world,’ Padstow, at the mouth of River Camel in the late afternoon, after a journey of some five and a half hours of sheer and utter nectar.
“Nectar” more invigorating than ” lashings of ginger beer” I presume?!
Almost!
Maybe our very own Thlamydia Merkins could be funded to do a stage show?
The audience reaction would be a shot in the arm for Britain’s neglected Over-ripe Fruit Industry!!
And nothing about support for artists who might not be commercially viable, nothing about supporting artists at all, when so many of us have, time and again, filled out their ridiculous forms, only to be rejected. If Arts funding agencies were run by artists, paid to do the job, maybe funding criteria could change, and do its job, which is funding art
You know who funds my art? The people who pay me to create it. No paper work, no committees, no rules. Just happy clients opening their checkbooks (or, better yet, wallets).
The problem is subsidising art in the first place. It makes the funding of art, socialist. So it’s not surprising it exclusively produces socialist art.
At least when real socialists funded art it looked nice. I mean, you gotta admire socialist realism. It might have been built on lies but it looked cool. It sounds like Arts Council England is built on lies AND produces dross. The worst of all worlds.
Dude if you think socialist realism looked cool you defo need to get out more.
Hi Dom, like the substack btw well done
Socialist, Marxist, even pro terrorist. The ACE has become a joke, funding nasty little groups like the 87 Press because: diversity https://www.thejc.com/news/poetry-house-that-gets-100k-grant-backed-palestinian-liberation-in-wake-of-hamas-terror-aenqi4s7
It’s diabolical but, at least on the net zero side of things, it’s doing exactly what is recommended by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC).
The IPCC’s sixth assessment report published in 2022 is highly confident that “Educational and information programmes, using the arts … can facilitate awareness, heighten risk perception, and influence behaviours” (p506) because “more proximate and personal feelings of being at risk triggered by extreme weather and climate-linked natural disasters will increase concern and willingness to act” (p547), which may be achieved by “presenting apocalyptic stories and imagery to capture people’s attention and evoke emotional and behavioural response“ (p555).
So there you are. UN-approved mass emotional manipulation and fearmongering using politicised arts to make people feel personally threatened, sanctioned and funded by dangerously self-deluded and self-serving zealots who couldn’t give two hoots about freedom of artistic expression or, indeed, the actual wellbeing of other people. Like all narratives sustained only by the force of propaganda, reality will eventually invade and collapse it, but not before huge amounts of damage are done. The rot really is endemic.
I’ve got a picture on my wall – does that make me an art “stakeholder” ?
That’s what happens when you work in “subsidized arts”. The subsidizer makes the rules.
Have we found the bottom in this institutional mass suicide that Woke bullying and trans-Stalinism is driving?
I love the modern use of the term ‘feel safe’.
This used to refer to things like slippery pavements, worries about being attacked etc.
Now it has morphed: we now have no idea who might not ‘feel safe’ or why.
Society is being paralysed.
Indeed. Being ‘unsafe’ has become yet another subjectively asserted identity.
“We respect the rights of individuals to hold their own beliefs, but once these have been made public by an individual, we must consider all stakeholders in the charity and their rights to feel included and safe.”
The rule of ‘but’ – the reader or listener can safely disregard anything that preceded that term. If one truly respects the rights of people to hold their own beliefs, that is a self-contained statement. It does not require qualifiers, it is not situational, it has nothing to do with others might think of said expression.
The last clause is particularly salient. To “feel” included and safe cuts both ways. Is the artist whose work is suddenly deemed to be heresy being included? Is a community that works under the watchful eye of thought police safe? If you are going to consider ALL stakeholders, then consider all stakeholders. Not just the ones who make the most noise or the ones whose cause is trendy for the moment. All of them.
That naturally means that someone might get upset, but that’s how being an adult in a somewhat free society works. It’s like democracy – it doesn’t only work when your side wins. When I see British period pieces that are populated by certain groups that were not a part of 18th or 19th century England, and presented as Oxford scholars no less, I don’t feel excluded or unsafe, just lied to, which is not how art is supposed to work.
“artist whose work is suddenly deemed to be heresy” it is not the work that they have a problem with, it is the fact that in their view the artist has made heretical statements in public, those statements probably have nothing at all to do with the work. There is nothing transphobic or even gender critical in any Harry Potter book, but JK Rowling has been “convicted” by the woke mob of transphobia, so they burn Harry Potter books.
The Jo Phoenix case was interesting because it was clear that the OU’s Vice Chancellor (the person who actual runs a university, as the chancellor is generally just a figure head) did not really have a problem with Jo and her views, but was scared that if the university supported her, as it was legally required to do, the VC himself would become the victim of an internal and external pile on. The judge rightly called out his cowardice.
The Jo Phoenix case judgment is rather long, but has loads of really useful nuggets in which anyone who is being discriminated or harassed because of their gender critical beliefs would be well advised to put under the nose of the boss of whoever is abusing them.
Irrelevant post commenting that I had been condemned to the sin bin. Which I was. For three hours.
Gone again. Goodness me. I must be a first class sinner.
There is no reforming the ACE. Shut it down; That’s the only effective method.
By the way, Keynes was unbelievably naive. At the same time, he had a very exalted view of his own intelligence.
What an excellent article, interesting, somewhat chilling, well researched, contextualised and written. Thank you Jonny
The long march through the institutions is nearly at an end… and the people making a career of leading the long march are looking for new challenges to keep them in a manner to which they have become accustomed.
But here’s the thing – there are very few functioning institutions left and the ordinary people have started to ask where all the money has gone, money that they are still expected to provide through their taxes.
So all the organisations that you could defund (such as the BBC, the Arts Councils, charity political pressure groups, obscure QUANGOs) without much loss to the well being of the country would nevertheless throw a lot of the great and good out of work. Which is why there is no governmental will to make it happen until it all becomes grotesquely unsupportable.
Even if the Arts Council wanted to have a relaxed approach to the political and moral views of the people it funds, it can’t take that risk as it depends on funding from e.g. National Lottery and other organisations committed to Stonewall’s vision of equality. Through DEI and equality standards certification, most of the third sector is now geared to excluding people who dissent from the trans activist agenda. I can’t see that changing in the time left for this lame duck Conservative government.
Good point. Institutional interdependence means you can’t just simply legislate one organisation to drop DEI/Net0 ideology, because funding, even if it all ultimately derives from the state, is channelled through multiple other infected organisations. Although, legislating to remove DEI from the Arts Council (if that’s possible) would create a crisis that might weaken the Stonewall grip.
Thank you for the article, and the discussion.
“independent review” Very unlikely.
And this after 14 years of so-called Tory govts.
Jilly Cooper was jolly sooper in her description of the Arts Council.
Whilst I am pleased Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has finally woken up, having been asleep at the wheel like the rest of her party on this issue. But with only a few months left to go in government is this all too little too late?
I feel the tide is now turning in favour of rationality vs woke insanity, but are all the recent gains going to be completely undone by Starmer and his woke cronies?
If art is going to be censored to take account of the possible health effects on particular groups ( and I don’t think it should be ) surely the health needs of old and conservative people , mental and physical , should be of the highest concern . These ‘stakeholders’ are more likely to have high blood pressure and be especially vulnerable to upset and needling by wokeist curators and ‘artists’ hoping to court favour with DEI functionaries .
When I go to exhibitions these days I often find there’s a “queer” bit, usually with little merit in terms of original thought or comparison with the rest. An Earth exhibition at the Barbican had a queer nature bit with the predictable clownfish. In Brighton women’s struggle to be accepted in football had a section on transwomen in football teams whose “struggles” bore no comparison to the redoubtable women profiled who had been severely censured and even banned over 130 years. And no consideration of whether fair for women to play against men. African fashion at the V and A included the inevitable trans designers when there was loads more to say about African fabrics and fashion.
Very happy to see LGB in arts and even transgender stuff but always? And what about quality?
It’s obvious that you have to throw in some low calibre queer stuff to get the funding and probably need to demonstrate you did it previously ( so it’s in the exhibitions where the punters pay.)
Like many I’m getting grumpy about this as a tax payer.
“We aim to recognise and champion the creative activities and cultural experiences of every person in every town, village and city in this country.” ACE
“Art belongs to the people. It must with its widest stretching roots go out into the very thick of the broadest masses.” V.I. Lenin
I can’t see what could possibly go wrong.
Mind you, even the art colleges of today with their last vestiges of suffocatingly quasi-Leninist Baby Boomer oversight have long demanded that art students attach meaningless didactic Soviet-style shitspeak to their works to make them politically acceptable.
Well there’s a half a billion pounds per year that could be easily saved
It almost always seems to be the case, where these woke organizations are concerned, that no names of individuals driving these agendas are given. They are, for the most part, safe behind a wall of anonymity.
Anyone objecting to their dictats or standing out from the herd is named publicly.
It’s a psychological trick and we go along with it. I call for the anonymous woke drivers to be publicly named much more frequently.
Woke fools take over organizations and turn them into political instruments of the culture war. They forget the purpose of the organization.
This explains why “the arts” have morphed into “predictably tedious wast of time”.
The problem arises with art forms that require public funding such a symphonies or large professional dance groups. These artists need to be paid or the public will be left with armature groups. Armatures cannot take time off from their real-world jobs to perfect their craft. Professional artists have always had to obtain patrons to pay them. The Catholic church paid for Renaissance art as propaganda illustrating churches with pictures of Bible stories for illiterate church members. Shakespeare had to get a noble patron to pay his bills etc. All rich patrons demand faltering and propaganda from the artist. This time its Woke propaganda that’s demanded. If the patron is being funded with tax money, the government should step in and change the direction of the desired propaganda to reflect taxpayers’ interest rather than a Woke bunch of activists who have taken over the organization. They are government civil servants, fire them if their propaganda agenda does not match the party in power.
The honest truth is that a lot of the “arts” that we think of like dance, painting, building things is frankly boring. By boring I mean it doesn’t resonate with the vast majority of any English speaking nations. They are regulated to small fairs, museums and niche companies and people. None of us care or bother at all. The weird truth is this “creative” and “activist” mentality IS the art. It is getting us(the majority) emotional and informed regardless if you like it or not. Like it or not, but modern art really is depressive, but at least activism makes my heart boil!
Such a clever twist in perspective. Made me smile with delight! Thanks Mechan
One thing Britan should spend money on is restoration of a mural that was painted at a commando training camp in Scotland. The artist showed all things about their training and expected heroic death. The artist duly died a hero at Normandy. This mural was painted over after the war. That paint over needs to be reversed and the civilian wall paint removed. Modern Xray techniques may restore the heroic masterpiece in honor of the dead heroes it showed just before their sacrifice. The arts council should spend the peoples tax money there rather than on Woke trans gender propaganda.
“God and the Soldier all men adore
in times of trouble, particularly war,
but when war is over and all things righted,
Good is neglected and the old Soldier slighted “.
We have exactly the same situation with the Arts Council in New Zealand, or ‘Creative New Zealand’ as it now calls itself, and its film counterpart the Film Commission, but you have to substitute the word ‘inclusivity’ with ‘Maori’. My brother, a longtime Tibetan Buddhist and documentary film maker, submitted a proposal for a doco on the belief in reincarnation in various societies and religions. He was turned down for its ‘lack of Maori content.’ That’s right – only films by or about the Maori (20% of the population) are now funded.
Just while you’re here — is the politically au fait pronunciation of “Maori” more correctly “Moli” or “Moldi”?
Didn’t ‘we’ WIN the Maori Wars?
I never tire of reminding people that the trans community is .003% of the population. How they have developed this much clout is beyond me. The media has helped, of course. They like anything weird.
By becoming part of the LGB**** culture, although poles apart. Also by appealing to the young which are very susceptible to this type of dysphoria.
Yes – but can we stop pretending that this sort of thing started recently and relates mainly to the trans issue. Ideological capture is nothing new. Like hilltops in the First World War, our institutions fall to one group after another. This is the Arts Council pushing feminism in the 70s and 80s:
https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article/32/4/553/6333648
> we must consider all stakeholders in the charity and their rights to feel included and safe
Excuse my French, but f**k anyone who talks like that. This sort of attitude needs to be squashed everywhere, and quick.
How completely appalling. Essentially, all art has to have a political purpose in line with state ideology (“DEI”). Elites seem fine with this.
Stalin told Shostakovich and Prokofiev what music to write. This is essentially similar. The difference is that, this time, the political arts fascism comes from nice middle class employees with degrees in politics and gender studies, with succulent access to the public nectar.
“A fool and their money are soon parted”. Trouble is that when it’s the government they just steal more of yours. Government – Business transactions cost double the amount for the same Business – Business transactions. The problem with the former is that they are so corrupt they are rarely completed in working order. You only have to review the visitapp created by the Canada Feds – 300million dollar farce that will never work yet thousands of far more complicated apps are developed business-business everyday – far less expensive that work.
An artist who wants to be funded by governent…isn’t one.
Cute. That said, exemplary artistic integrity butters no parsnips. Surely you don’t want to make art the province of the independently wealthy alone?
It’s reached the point where the gender Maoists have nothing left to do with the gay and lesbian community. Yet presumably most of these new cultural gate-keepers grew up gay (even lesbian, if more doubtfully)?
Perhaps what has happened is that they have ceded the ground to Judith Butler’s grandchildren- those riotous 20somethings, the social media zombies.
“The director of Burgh House, Mark Francis, emailed Clare to explain: “We respect the rights of individuals to hold their own beliefs, but once these have been made public by an individual, we must consider all stakeholders in the charity and their rights to feel included and safe.””There is zero awareness of the role these ‘liberals’ are playing. Albert Camus explains it best: “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”
All the time they’re telling us the agenda to our faces. And we dont recognize it. TRANS,TRANS,TRANS. That word. Everything is trans from a loaf of sliced bread to a living room curtain. Trans,it’s short for Transvestite, right? No,that’s SO 1970s.
Transgender,no because you don’t just wake up and find your body bits have morphed in the night and most don’t even bother with that time consuming and costly business of getting remodeled,so you’re not transferring from one sex to the other,youre just putting on an ill fitting dress and far from making an effort to look attractive like the trannies of old,you are seeking to look alarming,disturbing,predatory and scary. TRANS it’s short for Transgression,and Transgression is another word for SIN,and SIN is another word for DEPRAVITY and depraved people like company in the isolation of their depravity so they put out to lure you in. They do it with images,cool images even if ugly,you make ugly cool. When theyve depraved you they move on to the next one and leave you to the wolves to render asunder. Russell Brand was depraved due to a dreadful childhood,TV leapt on his depravity and encouraged it,deepened it,exploited it. By strong effort and I believe with a lot of pain he escaped that depravity and now so exemplifies a REDEEMED person,they hate him for that. They make depraved sexual behaviour sound reasonable and rational,even logical. Based on facts. So Enlightenment. Facts change.
I appreciate your post, Jane. It put me in mind of this article that I read a while back:
https://areomagazine.com/2023/03/15/cute-authoritarianism/