On Who Gets to Protect Art
For a long time, I believed that “public interest” was morally superior to anything private. Art should belong to everyone. Culture should be shared. Knowledge should be open.
That belief came from a good place — and also from a naïve one.
Because over time, I started noticing a pattern that made me uncomfortable: the very systems that claim to serve “the general public” are often the least capable of protecting fragile things.
Not because people are stupid. Not because the public is malicious. But because attention, time, taste, and emotional bandwidth are unevenly distributed — and always will be.
Most people are busy surviving. Art requires surplus.
This is why the tension never goes away. Marx was right about one thing: class struggle is permanent. But culture doesn’t resolve itself through equality. It survives through protection.
The paradox hit me most clearly when I thought about the British Museum.
Yes — its collections are inseparable from empire, coercion, and extraction. That history is real and uncomfortable. But it is also true that the institution did something many states could not or would not do: preserve, catalogue, contextualise, and make accessible works that might otherwise have been politicised, neglected, or destroyed.
Two things can be true at the same time:
the origins can be morally compromised
and the container can be historically effective
This doesn’t justify empire. It explains preservation.
I used to think privatisation was the enemy of public good. Now I see that unprotected “publicness” often becomes politics, propaganda, or flattening. What actually sustains culture are buffers — institutions that sit between power and people, insulated enough to resist capture, but open enough to allow access.
This is also why I don’t trust states — especially authoritarian ones — to protect art. Any system that prioritises narrative stability, moral clarity, or ideological alignment will eventually clash with ambiguity, exile, interior suffering, and dissent. Art becomes instrumentalised or erased.
But the West is not innocent either. Market logic erodes depth just as efficiently as censorship erases it. One flattens by scale; the other by force.
So where does that leave someone who cares about art, mental health, and lived experience — especially diasporic experience?
It leaves you choosing stewardship over purity.
Not mass entitlement. Not private hoarding. But protected access.
The hardest thing to accept is this: serious culture has always survived in selective containers — patronage, trusts, archives, endowments, universities at their best. Not because the public doesn’t deserve it, but because without protection, there is nothing left to share.
This isn’t elitism. It’s realism about fragility.
I no longer ask whether something is “public” or “private”. I ask whether it can survive.