e National Portrait Gallery (also rehung at the height of the woke moment), Samuel Pepys stands condemned to posterity as a sex abuser by the label fixed next to his picture. I sometimes wonder if I will live to see the curator intelligent enough to replace it with one explaining that his diary is one of the all-time wonders of human introspection and that Pepys’s extramarital excursions are not even the 100th most interesting thing in it. One strand of opinion holds that these organisations have the power to stamp their values on society permanently. But it is worth countenancing another future, in which those institutions still clinging to the fashionable ideas of the 2020s exile themselves from the mainstream and doom themselves to irrelevance as the rest of society simply moves on.
The big beasts of capitalism are already moving on. Bud Light, for instance, is focusing on blokey good humour now in their latest Superbowl ad, trying to put the Dylan Mulvaney disaster behind them. Universities and cultural institutions, on the other hand, are going to take a lot longer. The people there actually believe this stuff: often enough it's how they got their jobs in the first place. Sometimes a touch of cynicism can be a good thing.
Leave a Reply