One of the poignant moments in Mick Jackson’s powerful 1984 nuclear holocaust drama Threads is a scene in which the staff of a museum remove paintings from the galleries for safe storage in advance of the nuclear bomb blast. The camera pauses briefly on the surface of a street scene by L. S. Lowry which captures the high point of the civilisation that would soon be destroyed. Lowry records a crowd of figures who are profoundly alien to one another yet united by their pursuit of industry. Jackson’s film prognosticates that the social and cultural threads which bound communities together would fail in the coming shock. The art which survives it might somehow help to rebuild the shattered society.

This hope is shared today by one American cultural administrator who, having missed out on the comradery of the Cold War civil defence volunteer core, believes that Donald Trump’s second presidency will be worse than a nuclear winter. Writing in an emergency column, the editor of the American magazine ArtForum Tina Rivers Ryan described the results of the vote as a “triumphant return to fascism” that would “target artists and intellectuals” and turn the US into a “wreck”. For her, culture’s role now is to “advocate for art in the same breath as social justice”.

We’ve heard this many times before. During Trump’s 2016 presidency and in the wake of the UK’s Brexit referendum, anglophone cultural institutions fuelled the rise of flaccid, self-satisfied #resistance art. Funders, curators, and critics joined forces to “resist and survive fascism”, in Rivers Ryan’s words, and they would again today “advocate for the ideals of democracy and justice”. Yet in November 2024, ArtForum’s mobilisation call chimes alone. Unlike in 2016, artists and the liberal art world have been largely silent, as though still stunned by the electoral result they had earlier warned would spell the end of democracy, if not the world.

The artnet magazine critic Ben Davis, one of the few voices ready to reflect on the loss, warned that since #resistance art had failed, it would also “not save us now”. More importantly, little could save this culture as its emergent right-wing counterpart is taking the credit for Trump’s win. Writing in The Times, James Marriott suggested that next to the podcaster Joe Rogan and musician Oliver Anthony, liberal academia and the arts now “look slight”.

Despite the temptation to abandon the legacy institutions that many might feel today, it is too soon to write them off in the expectation that the oncoming rightward lurch will bring with it boundless new formations, opportunities, and ideas that will somehow magically constitute a culture for all. It is on the one hand fanciful to imagine the people storming museum collections and tearing down politically cumbersome curatorial labels and on the other terrifying to voluntarily feed our imaginations on the output of YouTubers, AI artists, and influencers alone.

Recent history, such as Poland’s eight years under populist rule, bears cautionary tales of culture produced out of political retaliation. Incompetence is no prettier than stupidity. The infrastructure of galleries and theatres is just too important to go to ruin as collateral damage. It is certainly true that art schools and museums have been the training grounds for a generation of arts apparatchiks who despise all that is good in art. But it is also in these same institutions that the culture which voters in many recent polls have asked to ‘return’ to has been hiding for the past decades.

After experiencing the deep “narrative shock”, as Davies put it, legacy cultural institutions will need earnest support in the reckoning. Their critics will need to be steadfast but mindful of the distinction between the objects’ form and content. Mainstream culture’s animators may already individually realise that sacrificing art to politics was a terrible way to campaign in elections. Laugh at them or console them, it is far more important that they understand that the cultural dominion which they have been promoting only found allies by excluding the majority from their audiences. If their total adherence to the friend-enemy distinction gave birth to a hydra, we must now know precisely which head to strangle. If we’re successful, the institutions will know that the perversions they expect of the future are as nothing compared to the NGO-industrial complex of which they have been sycophantic advocates.

The US cultural hegemons whose now flopped culture runs on free-market philanthropy might look for sympathy from their UK state-funded counterparts. But Brits have been grieving for many months now and recently graduated from bargaining to depression. After over a decade of playing the politics of the elect, the UK’s cultural leaders realised that they have remarkably little to show for it. Labour’s electoral victory failed to excite even those who bought the party’s vision of culture as a driver of economic growth. With art schools closing and Arts Council England encouraging organisations to produce 15 per cent less art, the glum has been so pervasive that the culture being somehow ‘stuck’ is now an unfunny meme.

Still, the prospect of projects like the ICA’s 2022 sex-work-is-work (literally) show or last year’s Hayward Gallery climate-change-is-real (ditto) exhibition happening again now seems absurd. Some UK institutions have begun quietly deemphasising their political missions. In a recent discussion, the directors of national museums tacitly acknowledged that priorities will turn towards the prosaic rites of maintenance and display. Tate Modern’s latest antic is a new programme of collecting Indigenous Māori artefacts. Welsh museums, meanwhile, are frantically decolonising their mining heritage. Such initiatives, however, are either so detached from even the cultural elites’ realities or are so poorly funded that they will garner no applause even from art’s most committed ideologues.

Exhausted from shovelling dirt from the trenches, arts leaders could find a moment to reflect on what their jobs were in the first place

Unexciting as Britain’s cultural politics is in comparison with America’s grand experiment, the situation allows for some nuance. In the UK, one priority might be undermining the cultural institutions’ monopoly on artistic thought. In the 1990s, before mainstream art got programmatically political, discussions on what culture might be for raged in independent project spaces and small-scale forums. British contemporary art is framed by this legacy today. By 2010, however, it was Tate that hosted the art world’s public reflections on, for example, the Arab Spring. Little by little, the institutions became the hosts for ideas, and, little by little, they constrained them until no one was left to disagree. The past year’s brutal tussles over who in the art world should be allowed to think and say what about Israel or Gaza have proved that these institutions were never equal to their task.

There is, indeed, an opportunity in the liberal institutions’ current bout of nausea. Exhausted from shovelling dirt from the trenches, arts leaders could find a moment to reflect on what their jobs were in the first place. We might encourage them to look back on their political initiatives and understand that they were, in fact, deeply undemocratic. We could tell them, this time without uncertainty, what it is that we really want.

Critical precision, again, will be key. In Threads, the Lowry painting never returned after the nuclear blast. Concerned with practical survival far more than the imagination, civilisation had to rebuild without art’s help. Culture thus turned out to have been a mere pacifier that gave a false sense of security to the fragile social order. Last year’s art might turn out to have, likewise, been a dummy. We still might want some of it to survive the shock.