The arts have always engaged with politics. Yet something decisive has changed in recent years. What happens when Activism meets the arts?

Culture Vultures

The arts have always engaged with politics. Yet something decisive has changed in recent years in the relationship between the two. Today the arts are routinely displayed, performed and interpreted through the lens of ideological agendas and charged with solving social challenges. The arts can certainly do good, but in making them all about activism, are we losing sight of the art itself?

Underfunded and undervalued, the arts are in crisis in contemporary Western society. Is over-politicising and over-bureaucratising them the answer? In a wide-ranging discussion of museums and galleries, period dramas, the musical and theatrical canon, and debates about access and arts education, Alexandra Wilson argues that advocating for the arts for all becomes harder when they are labelled as elitist, accused of historic wrongs, or reduced to utilitarian purposes.

Understanding the arts in their historical and political contexts is vital. But today's arts world often anachronistically thrusts the politics of today onto art from the past. Wilson argues that it is time for some fresh thinking. She presents an optimistic vision for rediscovering the enjoyment, meaning and sense of community that can be derived from the arts, when approached on their own terms.

Alexandra Wilson

Professor Alexandra Wilson is a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College. Her research straddles the disciplines of Music and History.

Professor Wilson received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2002. She was a Junior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Music at Worcester College, Oxford (2001-2004) and subsequently the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (2004-2005). In 2005 she was appointed to a lectureship at Oxford Brookes University, where she worked until 2024, latterly as Professor of Music and Cultural History. In 2024-2025, Professor Wilson held a Research Residency at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama alongside her position at Jesus.

Professor Wilson’s first book, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (CUP, 2007), won the American Musicological Society’s Lewis Lockwood Award. Her book Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain (OUP, 2019) was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and her book Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (OUP, 2025) was supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. She is a regular cultural commentator, frequently writing for national newspapers and magazines, appearing on the BBC, and working with all the UK’s major opera companies. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022.

Philip Clark

Philip Clark is a music journalist who has written for many leading publications including The Wire, Gramophone, Jazzwise, The Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement and the Financial Times. He also writes regularly for Prospect and New York Review of Books and is Dave Brubeck's biographer; his next book Sound and the City: Listening to the History of New York will be published in April 2027 by White Rabbit. He trained as a composer but these days prefers to produce his own sounds, playing piano as part of a weekly free improvisation workshop. Clark lives in Oxford with his wife, two children, two cats, and more recorded music than he can ever listen to.

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