Not long ago, someone, anonymously of course, accused Freedom in the Arts of having an agenda. The audacity! That two women, myself and Denise Fahmy, who have both been hounded, bullied, and professionally damaged in the arts would start an organisation about bullying in the arts… with an agenda? Yes. The agenda is to stop bullying in the arts.
And if that sounds controversial, you might not be paying attention to what’s really going on in Britain’s cultural sector — where artists are under siege, institutions cower in fear, and ideological conformity is enforced with the subtlety of a witch trial.
The latest victim is Layla Khoo, a thoughtful, site-specific artist whose gentle, participatory work has been engulfed by a national scandal. Her piece A Virtuous Woman, made for the National Trust’s Hardwick Hall, was never meant to provoke outrage. In fact, its strength lies in its openness; a rare and beautiful act of trust in the public.
Khoo is a multimedia artist working in ceramics, textiles and installation. She is regularly commissioned to create site-specific works in collaboration with museums, communities and historic collections. Her current PhD research explores how participatory, contemporary art can engage people with different heritages. As she puts it:
I’m particularly interested in how the act of participation itself can be used as an evaluative tool, and unexpected and evolving outcomes resulting from participation.
In other words, her work is not polemical- it’s relational. Her artworks are living documents, shaped by many hands. A Virtuous Woman invited visitors to collectively reimagine a missing Elizabethan embroidery. People were encouraged to add their own stitches; words of value, names of women they admire, using donated, recycled fabric. It ran from April to November 2024. Over 800 names were added, including seven instances of J.K. Rowling.
Then things got complicated. Two people stitched Rowling’s name. Another participant stitched a line in trans pride colours through those names — a symbolic act of protest. Later, in two separate events, members of the Women’s Rights Network staged a protest and later on two independent women attended and physically cut out the protest stitches. The work was taken offline, covered up, and eventually removed by the National Trust. And the artist Khoo? She was branded both a transphobe and a traitor to her gender.
This is the madness of the culture wars at full tilt. If it weren’t real, you’d think it was satire. But Khoo’s real-life work may yet go down in the art history books as one of the most accurate artefacts of our age, a soft, hand-stitched testament to our intolerance, fragility, and fury.
“The artwork was always intended to be dynamic,” Khoo writes. “Responding to the ways in which people wanted to take part.”
She and the Hardwick Hall team had agreed that participants’ contributions would not be censored or removed. She refused to unpick Rowling’s name, and she refused to remove the protest against it. Both were legitimate acts of participation, she argued. Both reflected the real world. What Khoo made was not a message. It was a mirror.
This case lays bare a dangerous shift in how we view the role of artists. Once, the artist was a craftsperson, part of a collective workshop. Then came the solitary genius: male, European, mythologised. That fantasy has been challenged by feminist thinkers like Griselda Pollock, who exposed the sexist gatekeeping of the canon. But now, we’re in a different kind of delusion — one in which the artist is no longer autonomous, but instead held personally accountable for everyone’s feelings.
The artist is no longer just the creator of the work; she is treated as a proxy, a vector for all that is supposedly wrong in society. She becomes the lightning rod, the scapegoat — the witch at the stake in a cultural witch-hunt. If she’s a woman, the judgement is even more ruthless.
This is not the way a civilised culture treats its artists. It’s not even the way an open society treats its citizens
Each artist must now be tested. Is she loyal to the cause? Has she been ideologically vetted? Art comes second — loyalty first. If she fails the test, the sentence is clear. She should be ducked. If she drowns, she was pure. If she floats, to quote one post following the campaign against Layla Khoo, “she’s a traitor to her gender.”
This is not the way a civilised culture treats its artists. It’s not even the way an open society treats its citizens. It is mob logic — reheated puritanism dressed up as progressive justice. And it is killing art.
Participation, the very heart of Khoo’s work, was weaponised. Her generous invitation; “Come stitch with me”, became the battlefield for two warring tribes. And when the National Trust removed the work, Khoo was left exposed. Neither side supported her. She was too trans-inclusive for the gender-critical crowd, too neutral for the Trans Rights activists. And she was too female, too nuanced, too independent for both.
I have been accused of transphobia for allowing the inclusion of Rowling’s name … and called a ‘gender traitor’ for allowing her name to be crossed out.
So here we are: a society that claims to love art, but only when it flatters us. An industry that claims to love diversity but punishes any deviation from the new orthodoxy. And institutions that commission artists, then seem to abandon them at the first whiff of scandal.
Art has become so heavily politicised, so narrowly interpreted through the lens of identity and ideology, that many people can no longer even see the art itself. They don’t encounter it openly or imaginatively. Instead, they approach it armed with a checklist; looking for signals, offences, or deviations. They are no longer asking what a work of art means or feels like; they are looking only for confirmation of their own views, and condemnation of those they oppose.
This is why Denise and I founded Freedom in the Arts. To defend art that speaks the truth — or at least allows multiple truths to exist in tension. To support artists who are brave enough to ask questions, instead of issuing slogans. And to protect them from mobs, bureaucrats, and bullies alike.
Because if we don’t, we’ll have no art left that’s worth a damn. Just propaganda, pasted onto gallery walls. The lesson of A Virtuous Woman is not that art must be safe, or that all views are equal, or that everyone must agree. It’s that participation is difficult, that pluralism is fragile, and that the artist’s job is not to resolve tension but to hold it. That’s not comfortable. It’s not easy, but it is art. And if we can no longer tolerate that? Then we don’t deserve artists like Layla Khoo.
