The Week in Art: 30 March 2025
More trustees, more on The Smithsonian, as well as pious critics, Just Stop Oil and a new Palestinian Museum to open
Last Week’s Week in Review, This Week:
Trustees:
Like the V&A, the British Museum has also recently appointed a new set of trustees. Once again while some seem like sound - progressive even - choices: historian and podcaster Tom Holland; TV broadcaster and presenter Claudia Winkleman and BBC journalist Martha Kearney, others leave more to be desired. (Austerity-loving, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne remains the board chairman.) Broadcaster and sociologist Dr Tiffany Jenkins is more problematic: she opposes the return of The Elgin (Parthenon) Marbles, which were seized by Lord Elgin from the Acropolis in Athens between 1801 and 1815, and has reignited debates over repatriation.
Trump’s Executive Order:
The Smithsonian Institution, targeted alongside six other agencies by Trump in an executive order on March 14 to be ‘eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law’. The institution is coming under fire for its progressive views, including that race is a social construct. The order asserts that the Smithsonian ‘has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology’, while critics see this as a move to sanitise the US’ history of racism. As part of a wider move to tackle diversity, equity and inclusion across key institutions, Trump’s actions this month come as no surprise. His inside man, JD Vance, will lead the purge of ‘woke’ ideology from within the Smithsonian as a member of its Board of Regents.
Click here for last week’s Week in Art.
British Museum Director Attacks ‘Pious’ Critics of the Industry’s Corporate Sponsorships:
Nicholas Cullinan in his FT op-ed ‘Think twice before attacking corporate sponsorship of the arts’ warns the debate over sponsorship will become ‘too pious’, and ‘it will be audiences, visitors and future generations who will ultimately pay the price.’ (Incidentally, the group most infamous for taking their protests to cultural institutions, Just Stop Oil, made news this week for declaring that they would be ‘hanging up the hi-vis’.)
Claiming he grew up below the poverty line (he was home-schooled), Cullinan thanks ‘the wisdom of cultural leaders and politicians in maintaining the principle of free entry that made culture accessible to families like ours’, and ‘generous support from the many enlightened philanthropists and donors who fund our great civic institutions, as well as government.’ While entry at national institutions is free, this access rarely goes beyond permanent collections (see my entry on ‘Pay What You Can’). Cullinan also neglects to mention the fact that this process of whitewashing, whereby wealthy parties donate a modicum of their wealth to institutions to get their name on the wall, has been going on for centuries. (For a contemporary example, see here.)
Just Stop Oil Announces They Will ‘Hang Up the Hi-Vis’ After Three Years of Climate Action:
Hannah Hunt, a representative of the climate action group, who was taken to court by the National Gallery, said on Thursday: ‘three years after bursting on the scene in a blaze of orange, at the end of April the Just Stop Oil campaign will be hanging up the hi-vis’. The group’s initial purpose, to ‘end new oil and gas’ is now government policy, and has no new plans to issue new licences.
With a final protest scheduled in Parliament Square on 26 April, Hunt signs off on a sombre note, ‘we are heading for 2C of global heating in the coming decade, resulting in billions being killed, mass civil unrest and social collapse. Meanwhile, we are seeing corporations and billionaires buying political power and using it to punch down on the weak and the vulnerable.’ A press release from their website reads ‘it is the end of soup on Van Goghs, cornstarch on Stonehenge and slow marching in the streets. But it is not the end of trials, of tagging and surveillance, of fines, probation and years in prison.’
Palestine Museum to Open in Edinburgh:
The museum, based in Woodbridge, Connecticut, will open its first exhibition on 17 May in the Scottish capital’s New Town. It will include works from Nabil Arnani and Samia Halaby, who won a special mention at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Faisal Saleh, the museum’s director, told the Art Newspaper that the establishment of the museum was ‘crucial in the face of Western media’s persistent negative coverage of Palestine and the alarming cancellations of Palestinian events,’ which mirrors growing sentiment in the city.