That’s right. The evil scumbags who work in the City appear to be doing a better job at being modern and liberal than the state-subsidised art world. According to last year’s Creative Skillset Employment Census, 5.4 per cent of those working in the arts were from the black or ethnic minorities. In the City, by contrast, figures from 2012 show that 30.5 per cent of employees were from the black or ethnic minorities.
So the decades of smug hand-wringing, the diversity drives and ethnicity awareness classes, the form-filling and box-ticking, has produced an arts workforce that Enoch Powell would have been proud of: 94.6 per cent white. Whereas in the neoliberal cesspit that is Canary Wharf – where the only form anyone has to fill is whether they want their bonus in coke or midgets – they’ve created a haven of multiculturalism.
For the arts establishment, this must be a bit like waking up and discovering that Nigel Farage will receive next year’s Turner Prize for voidal parallelism in post-internet art. For me, it all finally makes sense. All that anti-capitalist rage from artists. All that envy. The years and years of telling everyone else how racist they are. It’s just a classic case of the lady (statistically probably white) protesting too much. If any of the CEOs of the major arts organisations ever want to move on, I know a man who loves heading up messed up white organisations:
Photo: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP/Press Association Images
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