In Britain, activists and celebrities have turned their ire on summer literary festivals, succeeding in getting some of them to drop the sponsorship of the investment company Baillie Gifford. Howard Jacobson comments:
Ask what Baillie Gifford has done apart from cough up money from which all writers benefit and you enter the political equivalent of “I know this guy who knows this guy who knows this guy who knows this guy . . .” It has “links,” in other words, and a link when you are playing holier-than-thou can be as tenuous as you like providing a bit of it dislodges in Israel. Oil, too, but the oil argument against Baillie Gifford has been a long time brewing. It’s the link that ends up in Israel that wins the game for whoever finds it.
The extent of the blackmail exerted on festivals, and on writers wondering whether or not to capitulate to it themselves, is hard to gauge. . . . Few, at either end of the bullying—and there can be no denying the bullying—want to say anything that will end in their being yoked into an unflattering conflation with, say, genocidal Zionists. It’s tough enough in these censorious times to write a book, get it past the sensitivity police, find someone to publish it, and then go out into the world to talk about it, without having to submit your solidarity credentials too.
Art eludes the mind of an activist. The best art doesn’t have an agenda, the activist has nothing else. Art finds the language it needs in the course of expressing itself. It is exploratory, self-contradictory, provisional. The minute art makes up its mind, it’s no longer art.
Read more on New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/06/anti-baillie-gifford-zealots-want-police-art-writers-must-not-give-in