Has the arts sector learned nothing?

Outside of revolutionary times, public institutions don’t usually get knifed by their enemies. Typically, they trip over their own shoelaces and politely apologise on the way down.

Britain is currently such an open wound that it offers no shortage of examples. Much ink has been spilled on the drifts and failures of core civic institutions, from universities, to regulators and broadcasters, to the police and justice system, to the civil service itself. Yet Arts Council England (ACE) seems to have perfected the art of self-sabotage, achieving the rare trick of annoying absolutely everyone at once. Artists are well aware that merit has been displaced in favour of identity politics tick-boxing exercises. At the receiving end, the public feel the culture they fund no longer belongs to them. Some threaten to bin it; others vow to fix it. But even the most polite commentators talk about ACE with clear desperation. 

In short, the time for a proper reckoning is long overdue. And in recent months, notably thanks to the relentless work of the campaign group Freedom in the Arts (FITA), it seems that momentum is building. The ACE independent review by Margaret Hodge, published in December 2025, is hardly a revolutionary document, not least because it defends the principle of a national arts council and rejects calls for abolition. Nevertheless, its diagnosis rightfully points out that trust has broken down at a very fundamental level. Over the last decades, ACE has become too bureaucratic, too remote, too prescriptive. 

Its flagship strategy in particular, Let’s Create, clearly became one controversial device — among many other bad practices — that pushed the organisation away from artistic excellence and towards managerial targets and social outcomes. In 2025, Wigmore Hall made some noise after it decided to cut ties with the public funding body over its mission statement, captured by identity politics. The harassment of Denise Fahmy, co-founder of FITA, further raised uncomfortable questions about the internal culture of ACE.

Given the abysmal state of the institution, any amelioration, however small, sounds like a victory. To replace Let’s Create, ACE has just issued an interim 12-page funding framework that finally notes freedom of expression three times, thus binning a dusty 42-page-long strategy document which did not mention it once. Take that, Goliath!

Following the Hodge review, ACE’s change of leadership ought to have prompted a long, awkward mirror session. As Dawn Airey steps into the foreground, one does wonder if, instead, we may be heading towards another victory lap. There’s no doubt that Airey is a serious operator, with decades spent at the sharp end of British media. The right question, however, is whether her appointment is a sign the organisation finally gets it, or proof it still doesn’t.

Precisely when ACE needed to demonstrate that it had fully heard the criticism directed towards it, it has chosen a Chair whose public rhetoric sounds remarkably similar to that of the people who presided over the crisis. In a recent interview, Airey called for greater trans visibility and delivered the bizarre ideological line that “the work of diversity is never done”. One can almost hear the appreciative murmur rippling through every arts conference coffee break in the country. 

Airey’s commitment to identity politics is hardly a recent enthusiasm. Under her leadership, Channel 5 became one of the earliest broadcasters to spread and glamourise anti-factual beliefs on gender and sex. Her wife, Jacqui Lawrence, isn’t a newcomer to these questions either. She co-produced, for example, The Gateways (2021), a documentary centred on lesbian stories, which of course includes straight guys — sorry, I mean “trans lesbians”. 

For the last two or three decades, British cultural institutions have behaved as though issues such as diversity, representation and access ought to be the organising principles through which every other question should be interpreted. As trust has broken down, and bureaucracy multiplied, this prescription cannot be seen as a remedy. But Dawn Airey’s appointment makes one wonder if she will be able to keep in check — if not clear out — the current leadership; and, if she cannot, where are the cultural leaders who haven’t stopped believing in judgement. Perhaps The Critic’s very own Pierre d’Alancaisez has an idea or two about this…

So let us think again from first principles, if the institutions and their administrators fail to do so. Art is not about diversity, or access, or urban regeneration. It is not about measures that are ontologically extrinsic to it. Art is first and foremost about art, and the artefact owes us nothing. The tragedy taking place now, when the institutions purposefully displace their internal standards and, in fine, produce boring work at best — propaganda at worst — is that this process is usually undertaken in the name of democratisation.

Because there are still good artists and good art around us, it may be hard for some to believe that the ecosystem is in an advanced phase of decay. But it is not because art possesses an extraordinary capacity for survival that we shouldn’t diagnose — or, even better, finally start treating — the institutional decline of the infrastructure that allows creation at scale in the first place. 

In effect, funding is hard power. The “elephant in the room” of cultural policy is that somebody, somewhere, does have to decide whether (and why) one work is better than another; and there’s no bureaucratic layer that can make us forget that this exercise is, at its core, partly arbitrary. It is simply a fact of life. This is why the West built something, the canon — and associated devices, such as a once vibrant art criticism scene — through which discernment could exist with a minimal degree of fairness. These have been constantly firefighting postmodern theories aimed towards their disintegration.

Today, most of the forces that curtail freedom of expression in the arts operate through subtler ways than overt prohibition. Artists, venues, and intermediary agents internalise the incentives that favour specific topics and neuter specific risks. People absorb the logic of that system from the point of conception — a properly Orwellian proposition. 

It works like the file-drawer problem in science, only with imagination instead of data. Over time the chain of creativity weakens: good art is supposed to beget more good art, exponentially, by raising standards and expanding what the next generation thinks is possible. When that chain is interrupted upstream, the loss is much greater than missing individual artefacts; it consists in the narrowing of the whole ecology of art creation.

Of course, the rub is that this is all taxpayers’ money. ACE doesn’t answer to the arts Twitter bubble or the conference circuit. It answers to a country that includes plenty of people who are increasingly tempted to vote for populist parties that advocate for smashing down the institutions. When your “priority places” overlap so neatly with the parts of England that trust cultural institutions least, a tone-deaf appointment starts to look like a strategic choice.

Perhaps, after spending so long discussing “access” or “impact”, they have lost the language required to discuss artistic excellence confidently

So to avoid any tasteless and senseless culture war “scalps”, is it really too much to ask for just a flicker of self-awareness? After the rows, the reviews, and the Hodge report, the institution’s big idea for renewal simply cannot be more of the same. The real unfinished business is remembering why the bloody thing exists in the first place: to back work of genuine artistic substance, work capable of surprising its makers and its audiences. Work that can sustain the chain of creation rather than merely signal the “right” things.

Many artists and art critics have spent years describing the issues with the art sector. Tragically, artistic institutions, with ACE placed at the core of this nexus, may be incapable of hearing it. Perhaps, after spending so long discussing “access” or “impact”, they have lost the language required to discuss artistic excellence confidently. This, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s words, is the triumph of the mediocre.