Art
Where to start? Enough with “blockbuster” shows that fail to shed fresh light on their subjects. Time, surely, to stop pretending the NFT (non-fungible token) “boom” is about fine art. Forced to pick just one resolution, though, I’d encourage our galleries and museums not to be so, well, preachy and judgy. Alas, there’s no guarantee that the great artists of the past were exemplars of moral rectitude in their personal lives – in fact, the opposite was often the case. So, curators of Britain, take note: let’s grow up and ditch the grousing, bellyaching and finger-wagging. Besides, in our age of hair-trigger disapproval and righteous condemnation, when artists bend over backwards to be empathetic and polite, couldn’t we do with a little more disruption and provocation, to challenge the consensus? After all, art, as Picasso once said, is supposed to be subversive.
Alastair Sooke
Books
Where are the young male novelists? Their marked absence from the contemporary literary scene has been one of the criticisms levied at publishing in the past 12 months as it finds itself caught in the crosshairs of the culture wars. So we need to hear more new male voices, however absurdly offensive this may sound to those who make lots of noise on Twitter. The threats facing fiction in the social media age are manifold, not least a growing distrust of pluralism and the subjective imagination, and in 2022 publishing needs to work ever harder to enable writers of all backgrounds to be free to tell the stories they want to tell. Or in the words of Bernadine Evaristo, novelists, in 2022, must be free to “stray from their lane”.
Claire Allfree
Classical music
This was the year classical music decided to fight for good causes. There was no shortage of them. As well as countering the depression and fear and sheer boredom of living under lockdown, there were other more politically contentious ones: giving proper exposure to marginalised composers, or raising awareness of looming environmental disasters. Amid all the earnest striving for relevance, it could often seem as if simple pleasure in music was taking a back seat. So my advice for classical music in 2022 is: set it free. Let it just be music, giving joy to the heart and nourishment to the mind.
Ivan Hewett
