Hurst

Britain today is no place for young people. The evidence is as familiar as it is stark. One million of the nation’s fourteen million children experienced destitution in 2022, meaning that their families could not afford to adequately feed or clothe them or keep them warm. In 2024, a record 150,000 lived in temporary accommodation in England. The long-standing decline in infant mortality has stalled. Facts like these, concerning the families struggling most, are often cited as proof of atrophy under Conservative austerity (which, while destructive in its own right, degraded Britain’s resilience against Covid-19 and the energy crisis that followed) and as indicators of the issues that Keir Starmer’s new Labour government should prioritise. But what do we miss by focusing on the worst-off?

Rachel Spence’s Battle for the Museum reflects a growing movement to redefine the art museum as a site of activism   and social change that has gained momentum in the United States and Britain around issues of race, equity, and diversity. Advocating the need for radical transformation, Spence paints an insistently bleak picture of art museums, recording their multiple failings on social, ethical, and political fronts. Forty pages in, this reader was already battle-weary, worn down by Spence’s thudding compendium of sins. That’s not to dismiss the validity of Spence’s arguments. The sector’s expansionist, exploitative, discriminatory, and profit-hungry urges warrant interrogation.