How will the Britain of today be remembered in a few decades? The dying organs of media and state suggest a memory that will be unkind. A recent undignified sprawl of ex-prime ministers before the Cenotaph spoke to a nation still in the midst of a gruelling political hangover. The last guard of National Treasures are in full retreat under a wave of senility, sex abuse and the rote regurgitation of an increasingly irrelevant politics. Viral figures that do catch the eye of the roving public speak to a sense of negation and piss taking: Tom Skinner, an autistic trainspotter called Francis Bourgeois, and more recently the 2nd coming of Jeremy Clarkson.

Still, cosy attempts to define our collective moment linger on. History Makers, a collection of contemporary trendsetters at the National Portrait Gallery offers at first glance what appears to be the curation of an overzealous secondary school art teacher. Stormzy, Michael Eavis, Anna Wintour, Harry Styles, Doctor Who actors and Michael Rosen glare down at observant huddles, who under the weight of the gallery’s institutional power find themselves forced into an inexplicably reverent silence.

This strange attempt to combine prestige with the sort of people who appear on The One Show has become an unignorable feature of modern Britain. Working in television in the years after Brexit, a noticeable sea change occurred when it came to commissioning ideas. In a world of populism and upheaval, a patchwork quilt of light entertainment stars might be thrown over audiences to deal with the harrowing subject matter of the day. Sue Perkins, Stacey Dooley, Stephen Fry. Their brief was expansive: everything from the ascendant metropolises of the third world to ISIS and the war in Ukraine. Beyond London, it was implied, lay a mass of sensitive souls frightened by this new world of change and social media. The more the power of television celebrity waned, the more authority and self importance they seemed to suck in.

Portrait painting has been a strange attempt to weave these figures into the national story. Programmes like Portrait Artist of the Year render a veritable conveyor belt of television non-entities immortalised by diligent amateurs and Sunday Painters. The process of “sitting,” and having one’s face etched out by a retiree from Poole is presented as a rite of vulnerability, some tender catharsis from the ongoing trauma of modern Britain.

It is impossible to visit some provincial gallery without stumbling upon some aggrieved face set in oils

Here the likes of Graham Norton, and other irreverent figures from the noughties are magically transformed into patrician and stately figures of emotional profundity. Such a hobby has been inflicted upon the nation like the compulsory leisure activities of a care home. It is impossible to visit some provincial gallery without stumbling upon some aggrieved face set in oils. The BBC presents us scores of local artists, churning out industrial quantities of portraits of the everyman on the street: the forgotten victim, the unsung hero. 

It’s no surprise, then, that the medium has become subject to both iconoclasm and crass fetishisation. Portraits are fussily removed from the prime minister’s office and destroyed at Cambridge Colleges. The King commissions paintings of the Windrush generation to be hung solemnly alongside forgotten Dukes in the pantheons of state. The medium is after all ripe for cynicism: a pastiche oil painting of one of the lionesses can be hung next to Isaac Newton in a dimly lit gallery and you are dared to bat an eyelid. 

But with History Makers this fad for cushioning sacred cows inside the realm of high art falls apart. A topless Sam Smith fingering a harp is displayed before viewers like a desperate prostitute in the shop window of an Amsterdam brothel. Peter Tatchell is depicted with a leering grin, reminiscent of that remedial prison art churned out by deceptive sociopaths. John Sentamu, the former Bishop of York recently defrocked after failing to address allegations of clerical child abuse, is forced into a saintly pose next to a face mask and bottle of hand sanitiser. These are not figures of grace and profundity, but the vulgar spirits of 21st century Britain mistakenly entombed in art.  

The exhibition’s unintentional purpose is to offer a jolting and harrowing narrative for the dizzying slide of 21st century Britain. Visitors can access the exhibition in reverse, first walking through galleries of nation builders, inventors and actual personalities before discovering it has petered out into a strange rabble of sports figures, disgraced clergy, genderfluid popstars and people famous for submitting emotional testimonies to an enquiry. Anyone visiting finds themselves less interested in the art, more the appalled reckoning of the gallery audience: home counties day trippers and Chinese tourists united by a sense that history is being made anywhere but modern Britain. 

… national cliches all too often badly interpreted by the unimaginative apparatchiks who work in our cultural industry

The US election suggested their time might be up. The equivalent gatekeepers to the nation’s character — in the form of Oprah Winfrey-era celebrity accelerated by a faux sense of “pandemic togetherness” — could not save Kamala Harris’s  campaign. As the writer Matthew Gasda observed,  America had become tired of “the progressive panopticon — of constant watching, judging and elimination of sceptics and dissenters.” In Britain, I suspect we feel the same about our own reactionary vanguard of innocuous iPlayer bores, who only seem to pop up in the culture via some suspicious repressive instinct. 

Tackling this within the realm of politics can be exhausting, even dull. There are more powerful, latent emotions that can be stirred in the culture, if not by the much maligned power of social media itself. As the rest of the gallery reminds us there is nothing written when it comes to recovering our national zeal, stifled by the vegetative emotions offered up by the carefully constructed adult play pen that is the BBC and its adjacent stuffy institutions. Bloody-mindedness, a suspicion of authority, a roving curiosity are the lifeblood of our innovation, humour and self-confidence, those national cliches all too often badly interpreted by the unimaginative apparatchiks who work in our cultural industry. If they can no longer articulate, nor understand this, then soon as the world changes around them, they will find themselves hopelessly irrelevant.