Charities Pay Museums Not to Be Museums

A tranche of money is going into museums, but with plenty of progressive strings attached. Art critic Alexander Adams investigates the paymasters of the progressive capture of museums.

On December 20th, Art Fund announced that it would pay 45 museums, galleries, and other cultural organisations a total of £1.8 million in new grants as part of a programme called ‘Reimagine’. The catch is that this money will undermine the Enlightenment principles on which the museums were originally founded.

Rather than the money going towards the core work of a museum, such as improving climate control, investing in conservation equipment, and archiving historical documents, much of it will go to outreach and community projects. As the organisation states, the grants will “support a number of progressive projects,” including a ‘Museum of Transology’: a “national archiving project bringing together the trans community, museums, and archives across the UK.” The grant will also fund an “exciting, play-themed, artist-led project here in Wrexham—the ‘Capital of Play’—exploring what it means for artists and children to work together as genuine co-producers.” Of course, Art Fund and its grant recipients conspicuously neglect to mention high art, aesthetic excellence, classical forms, ancient history, and traditional British culture.

From Worthy to Woke

Art Fund, founded in 1903 as the National Art Collections Fund, was set up to collect donations to be spent on artworks for museums without resorting to public funds. Since then, it has augmented this activity with progressive activism. Its website lists its priority as “empower[ing] the audience.” Rather than encouraging experts to present and explain artefacts with attempted objectivity, Art Fund intends to give audiences power through representation and participation, asserting its aims are a “quietly radical force for good”—a sort of Fabian Society for culture. The current Chairman is Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury, former Labour Minister for the Arts. 

On its diversity-inclusion-equity page, Art Fund talks about money being used to “address gaps in [museum] collections.” This means allocating resources to client groups of progressives, including women, sexual minorities, religious minorities, and ethnic minorities. As agreed by those trained in Neo-Marxist analysis, privilege is enforced by control of territory and resources. Art Fund acts to deprive the “privileged” by putting power in the hands of client groups via allies within institutions. Rather than eliminating class privilege, Art Fund is transferring privilege to preferred groups.

One of December’s ‘Reimagine’ grants was awarded to Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery to fund “a major exhibition celebrating Black British women’s creativity from 1970 to today.” Other projects focus on migrants, transgender people, and other “marginalised” groups. The Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast received a grant “to substantially improve its engagement with hard-to-reach audiences in marginalised communities.” Rather than encouraging migrants to learn English by introducing them to local culture, the money will be used to produce packages in the languages of the migrants.

Rewarding the ‘Reset Agenda’ 

As well as the millions of politically charged pounds administered by the organisation each year, Art Fund also administers a national annual prize for museums. In 2022, the winner was the Horniman Museum, London. The press release cited Horniman’s “transformational Reset Agenda—an ambitious program focused on re-orienting activity to reach diverse audiences more representative of London.” Activities included environmental awareness campaigns and the hosting of a black music festival—neither of which are typically associated with museums. The prize appears to have been given to reward a museum for not acting as a traditional museum.

Whatever value activities rewarded by Art Fund have, many of them do not need to be associated with museums. Such initiatives can distract staff and dilute the core mission of a museum, which is to serve as a repository for learning about beautiful and valued artefacts held in trust for the people and for their display, study, conservation, and promotion. It is this definition that the Art Fund and its partner, the Museums Association, consider to be discredited.

The Arte Útil Movement

A telling phrase in Art Fund’s press release relates to a grant helping to “advance the Arte Útil movement in Wales.” The Arte Útil—useful art—movement is one that seeks to enable activist curators and “artivists” to do semi-artistic activities resulting in concrete social change. Headed by Cuban artivist Tania Bruguera, the movement advocates for migrants, minority groups, and political dissidents. In 2011, she issued a manifesto for migrants, stating that “the functionality of international borders should be re-imagined in the service of humanity.”

An organisation called Arte Útil provides publicly-funded museums with money to alter core principles. Its website says, “Arte Útil draws on artistic thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that change how we act in society.” When Alistair Hudson, Director of Manchester City and Whitworth Galleries, accepted a share of a £75,000 grant from Arte Útil and Outset Partners on behalf of his museums, he said, “Our museums will radically transform their core protocols by redrawing relationships with local constituent groups and creating an agency to inform the museums' collecting, curating, and presenting.”

That donation came four years after Hudson had provided Arte Útil with a platform at a venue he had managed. Hudson was later ousted from Manchester museums following its hosting of an exhibition by Forensic Architecture (an art collective) that was accused of anti-Semitism. Currently, Hudson and Bruguera are listed as directors of Arte Útil.

Outset Partners buys art for the Tate, seemingly on the basis of artist demographics, enabling the gallery to transition from a museum of Western modern art to one housing world art. It expresses a “commitment to being there at the outset of impactful change.” Outset Partners is partly financed by Art Fund, the Mayor of London, and Arts Council England, which receives most of its funds directly from the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS).

Despite engaging in political campaigning, both Art Fund and Outset Contemporary Art Fund are registered charities—a conflict of interest forbidden by law. Arte Útil does not seem to be a registered charity in England. 

From Museum to Social Centre

If the university system trains curators in social-justice activism to subvert museums, and the Museums Association provides morale for curators-as-commissars, then Art Fund, Arte Útil, and Outset Partners are the paymasters who incentivize museums to become hosts for play, wellness, migrant outreach, and minority music festivals. The ultimate end is to completely eliminate cumbersome art and for museums to become social centres. 

Once one understands the network of cross-party support for progressivism in the public arts, it is easy to see why our museums have become so degraded. Considering how deeply DCMS and all major political parties are committed to the progressive agenda, do not expect any changes to come from the top or from within the system. Change must come from outside the system.

Alexander Adams is a British artist, critic and art historian. His book Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History is published by Imprint Academic.