The Manchester Art Gallery‘s Director has removed a well-known Pre-Raphaelite painting “Hylas and the Nymphs” (1896) by J. W. Waterhouse, calling it an “embarrassment”.

This is obviously about the political trolls getting ‘a foot in the door’ and trying to widen the spectrum of ‘acceptable’ political censorship in art galleries. Accept this, and the next removals will be even more serious.

If I know the political far-left then their end-game is pervasive censorship of nudity (to make a ‘safe space’ for various groups), alongside a ‘Year Zero’-style erasure of the mythic past from museums and galleries. The leftist Independent newspaper gives the game away on this, with a headline which asks: “Why are we in such a hurry to erase the past?”. Which implies that the left’s political project is to “erase the past”. But that the left doesn’t want to hurriedly tip its hand too soon, and thus make the public aware of what its long-term aims are.

Thankfully it’s all futile, a powerless power-fantasy of the leftist professional elites who are rapidly losing their status as cultural gatekeepers. So possibly the censorship in Manchester is just about the Director cynically angling for a big pay-off, when she’s sacked for bringing both the gallery and the curatorial profession into disrepute.