Fair play to Jesse Darling. Not only do his Turner Prize-winning installations No Medals, No Ribbons and Enclosures - sculptures created using red tape and pedestrian barriers - pass pointed comment on the sorry state of a nation divided deliberately through austerity and fabricated culture wars, but he used the platform given to him by the award to make a political statement too.
Darling declared that "[Margaret Thatcher] paved the way for the greatest trick the Tories ever played, which is to convince working people in Britain that studying, self-expression and what the broadsheet supplements describe as 'culture' is only for certain people in Britain from certain socio-economic backgrounds. I just want to say don't buy in, it's for everyone."
I don't know about "the greatest trick the Tories ever played" - after all, they've played some astonishing ones, and continue to do so on a practically daily basis - but it's indisputable that Thatcher was responsible for erecting barriers to deny access to the arts to millions of people as both consumers and creators, as recently evidenced in Tish, Paul Sng's documentary about the life of working-class photographer Tish Murtha. Those barriers have been reinforced rather than dismantled in the years since she left power.
And Darling wasn't done there, brandishing a Palestinian flag "[b]ecause there's a genocide going on and I wanted to say something on the BBC". No doubt his comments will have proven divisive - appropriately enough.
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