Moore please

S Moore is making progress, but at the expense of appearing less frequently in the Graun (she appears now and then in the Times). This is an owlish (of Minerva) piece, at first anyway:

We have been having an unacknowledged culture war for a long time – it led to Brexit and this administration...Those who want to see this as a rightwing coup lost the culture war, because their cultural horizons were so limited. Many of them worked within the culture industry, so were doubly enraged by the leave vote, and are not used to being on the losing side....Having always believed that culture precedes politics, that artists, musicians and film-makers are the canaries in the mine, I still feel enraged at what didn’t happen. [silly culturalism, but carry on]...

A bit of class hatred now, directed at the right target at last:

every day in 2016 one notable or another told us to vote remain. It was patronising. None of these people seemed to be in touch with anything except other people who went to private views and mused over rubbish conceptual art....Every time I tried to talk of Englishness as a demon and a premonition, I was told that I wasn’t internationalist or left enough, that to discuss Englishness as the Scots had discussed their identity was verboten....This same cultural establishment reigns. In response to Brexit, it has produced some of the worst art ever seen, such as Anish Kapoor’s gaping gash. The establishment doesn’t do provincial, but then is deeply shocked when people feel no investment in it because art is meant to be good for us. The ungrateful gits don’t get that, do they? No-deal Brexit is also very bad for people; don’t they get that, either?

Mind you, her version of the culture war is still pretty genteel, petit-bourgeois avant-garde/community theatre stuff:

Jeremy Deller has wondered about national identity in his wonderful show English Magic, drawing new maps of England based on the routes of David Bowie tours. Grayson Perry has asked difficult questions. Shane Meadows always does. Jez Butterworth has given us Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a pagan deviant. PJ Harvey has sung of blood and bones and white chalk and what makes England shake. Billy Bragg has long been looking for a new England. Young guys in council blocks have made music that really was a new England.

Marks for trying though,for letting proletarian good sense intrude now and then, if only to be quickly larded over with Graun values