Great review from @PhilipHensher on @amwilson_opera's book Culture Vultures. 'There is the idiot who wrote a book about the Bloomsbury Group claiming that Virginia Woolf should be considered as ‘identifying as non-binary or trans’. ‘If we do not rethink these texts through the lens of the present, they will cease to have meaning for the present,’ another opines. A curator explains that a painting by Manet of a ham shows his appalling attitude to women’s rights. There are the commentators who, having spent years complaining that certain classes of society are excluded from ‘the arts’, respond to a black man beautifully playing an Elgar concerto with the observation that ‘a black cellist cancels itself out’. (In what other context would it be OK to refer to a black man as ‘it’?) [....] In reality, when a book is explicitly political, like John Buchan’s Greenmantle, or when some incidental illumination of society may be extracted, as in Seurat’s painting ‘A Sunday on the Grande Jatte’, it may not be the most interesting thing about it. Anyone can explain about industrialised labour and excluded minorities in Seurat’s ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ – the boys have skived off on a weekday for a dip, and so has the bowler-hatted clerk gazing lecherously at them – but nobody goes on looking at it because it’s disapproving of capitalism or heteronormativity. The curators and the commentators of this world are convinced otherwise. This fundamental error has led to some truly terrible works, guaranteed to put anyone off painting or music or literature forever. If the arts of the past are shown to possess some element that would not appeal to the average thirtysomething with a trust fund living in Hoxton today, it is decided that they should be replaced. If written or painted by a dead white male, then all the worse. Admittedly, some of the substitutes turn out to be of the first rank, such as a Barbara Hepworth or Amy Beach’s piano quintet. (It is noticeable that the novel is less prone to censure, having been embraced by women, racial minorities, gays, lesbians, and, for more than a century and a half, working-class writers.) It seems inadequately accepted, however, that if you play a curious 12-year-old Holst’s ‘Planets’ suite, they will grow up to love good music; but if you play them an orchestral novelty commissioned for last year’s Proms on the grounds of inclusion by an official body, they will listen because they have to and never give it another thought. Wilson’s book is richly exasperated, full of examples of people who shouldn’t be let within a mile of an art gallery or an orchestral podium.' spectator.com/article/the-ar…