As we emerge from the shackles of the pandemic, museums, theatres and live shows are finally returning with a plethora of exhibitions and performances.
But the revival of our cultural gems is being tarnished by the relentless March of Woke.
Great works of music are being changed so as not to upset certain minorities; art exhibitions are littered with notices warning viewers of potentially offensive content; and classic works of literature are being 'edited', censored or changed.
Here, a despairing CHRISTOPHER HART reports on some of the most egregious examples from the Great Age of Cultural Vandalism...
'CANCELLING' ONE OF OUR GREATEST ARTISTS
Hogarth And Europe: Tate Britain (until March 20)
One of the greatest satirists in British art, William Hogarth's works savagely mocked and lambasted the follies and vices of the Georgian world around him. He has been described as arguably Britain's most influential visual artist.
Some of our most lauded contemporary artists, including David Hockney, Paula Rego and Grayson Perry, have paid homage to his work.
Yet a new exhibition at Tate Britain, which showcases some of Hogarth's greatest work alongside that of his continental contemporaries, stands accused of 'cancelling' him with notices warning the viewer about his paintings.
A self-portrait by English painter and engraver William Hogarth. The work shows him sitting on a wooden chair
One of the labels, alongside a self-portrait showing Hogarth sitting on a wooden chair, insists the painting should be seen in the context of slavery.
'The chair is made from timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also enslaved people. Could the chair also stand in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?'
In another label, a Chinese-American academic tells us a painting offers us a veritable 'picture of White degeneracy'. Thankfully, art critics turned on this nonsense. One described it as 'wokeish drivel', saying the 18th-century artist had been 'yanked into today's culture wars'.
Another stated that the curators, with their 'extreme anxiety towards social attitudes in this period', treated Hogarth's work as 'bombs waiting to explode'.
The artist was fiercely patriotic, enthusiastic about going to war against foreigners, and entirely untroubled by the existence of traditional gender roles.
He probably sang Rule Britannia in the bath, and definitely thought the French were so weak and spindly because they didn't have the great good fortune to dine on the Roast Beef of Old England. (See his hilarious painting of that name.)
He was, in woke terms, utterly toxic. Which explains why the commissars at Tate Britain appear, in the words of yet another critic, to be gripped by 'paroxysms of embarrassment about the art they have elected to show'.
OBJECTIVE SCIENCE IS 'NON-INCLUSIVE'
Permanent collection: Science Museum
Surely the cool, logical and objective world of science would be free from all this juvenile hysteria?
Alas, no. If you go down to the Science Museum today, you will find no escape. In a truly spectacular display of institutional wokery, the museum has recently given in to pressure from the ever-vocal transgender lobby, and agreed to thoroughly rejig its gallery about human biology in order to 'update the non-inclusive narrative'.
The gallery had been using such formerly widespread but wicked terms as 'Boy' and 'Girl', but will now use fewer gender-specific terms to cover non-binary people.
The Science Museum also consults with the Museum of Transology in Brighton, which works to 'halt the erasure of transcestry' and to 'reclaim the power to write QTIBIPOC (Queer, Trans and Intersex, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) history' via its own challenging collection of precious artefacts, which include a Hello Kitty plush toy and a pair of M&S boxer shorts in a plastic bag.
SHAMING OF SLAVE TRADERS AT THE BANK
Slavery exhibition: Bank of England Museum (spring 2022)
Even the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street isn't safe. The Bank of England recently announced that it will proudly re-open its museum, which has been shut because of Covid, with a positive and uplifting exhibition about...how several of its former governors and directors had links with the slave trade.
The portraits of these shameful offenders have currently been removed altogether, but will be put back on display for the exhibition, their crimes listed, and since they have been dead and buried for two or three centuries now, they will, of course, have no chance to defend themselves
Perhaps visitors should be encouraged to throw rotten tomatoes at them?
The Bank of England recently announced that it will proudly re-open its museum, which has been shut because of Covid
One might think that the Central Bank of the United Kingdom, instead of indulging in these feigned displays of shock and disapproval that not everyone in the past had strictly 21st-century values, might be better engaged addressing the current rate of inflation, approaching 5 per cent.
Still, the Bank of England's governor, Andrew Bailey, denies that they have gone 'woke, whatever that word actually means'.
Really? An institution whose own website on several occasions name-checks an American victim of police violence, poor George Floyd? Why? Was anyone from the Bank of England involved?
An institution whose recent report Court Review Of Ethnic Diversity And Inclusion argues in purest PC gobbledegook about the bank's need 'to identify, surface and address micro-aggressions, alongside understanding the power of micro-affirmations'.
Yes, but what about the economy?
WAGING WAR ON HERO CHURCHILL
Permanent collection: Imperial War Museum
The Imperial War Museum, with several branches in London, Manchester and RAF Duxford, Cambridgeshire, is in its own words 'the world's leading museum of war and conflict'.
Its Second World War Galleries and its Holocaust Galleries are hugely admired, while its Churchill War Rooms remains one of the most dramatic and evocative
