Mick Hartley

Ceramicist Claudia Clare is the latest female artist to be cancelled. Yes, it's somehow always the women.

Jo Bartosch – The closing of the artistic mind:

Having been variously branded an ‘Islamophobe’, a ‘whorephobe’ and most recently a ‘transphobe’, ceramic artist Claudia Clare is used to triggering the art world’s ‘progressive’ elite. Nevertheless, it came as a great shock when, three weeks ago, the 60-year-old feminist’s invitation to speak at Ceramic Art London, hosted by Central Saint Martin’s, was revoked – apparently due to a risk of protest which ‘might put the show itself under threat’.

Clare had been booked two years ago to display and discuss her work about women escaping the sex trade, but on 9 February this year, a letter from the Craft Potters Association (CPA), which organises Ceramic Art London, informed her: ‘In the time since the talk was originally scheduled in 2020 we have been made aware that its inclusion in the programme may cause the event to be disrupted, leading to possible delay or even closure.’

Clare tells me that her impression was that she ‘could have been talking about the Beano, it would have made no difference’. ‘Apparently I am the problem’, she says, ‘But I am not threatening to disrupt anything’….

The threat identified by the CPA was apparently from the brats at Central Saint Martin’s, who might have been triggered to protest due to Clare’s opinions. Rather than welcome dissenting voices or encouraging a discussion, the CPA’s kneejerk reaction was cancellation. It seems that far from pushing society’s boundaries, today the doyens of the art world have become more risk averse than your average insurance analyst.

There is a telling paradox at the heart of the art world. While the new trans orthodoxy holds that sex difference is irrelevant, and bizarrely that biology itself is a social construct, it seems to be overwhelmingly women artists who bear the brunt of woke censorship – Jess de Wahls, Nina Edge, Rachel Ara to name but a few. While they are cast out, male artist Grayson Perry, who famously explores concepts of sex and gender identity, is prized as an eccentric national treasure.

Art depends on freedom of thought and crucially freedom of expression. For this reason, artists across the world have long occupied a central role in the defence of liberty, kicking against repressive regimes and censorship. Yet today, a cadre of professionals in the arts sector have taken it upon themselves to act as morality police.

Organisations like CPA have forgotten that their purpose is not to coddle the feelings of the perpetually offended, nor to avoid conflict, but rather to further artistic expression by standing-up for their members. Clare has resolved to publicly challenge such thought-policing, and she is launching legal action against the CPA. It’s darkly funny that Clare feels she has to turn to the famously fusty judiciary to uphold the values that underpin artistic expression.