Art with an agenda

sir – It is nonsense for Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, to claim that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement “has changed the climate so that silence was now perceived as being complicit” (report, November 4). Things are only seen in that way by BLM and inside a small bubble of the chattering classes, not by the vast majority of Britons.

Anyway, in what would the National Gallery be complicit? In supporting slavery? Absurd.

There will always be angry, singleissue movements claiming that if you are not with them, you are against them. Such claims are baseless.

The BLM movement is nakedly political and, if people like Dr Finaldi submit to the wishes of voluble extremist groups like this, they betray their positions of responsibility.

Their complicity will not be in some imagined genuflection to slavery, but in bending the knee to BLM’S Marxist, anti-capitalist agenda and the violence of too many of its supporters. Gregory Shenkman

London W8

sir – There is no chance of halting the “Leftwards drift of the upper middle classes” (Comment, November 4) until we acknowledge the extent to which arts and heritage bodies have been politicised by their administrators.

An arts administrative caste has for decades substituted social engineering and the imposition of quotas for a due recognition that, in the arts, quality and merit alone are of the essence.

Any attempted reforms that do not start with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport will fail. Michael Daley

Director, Artwatch UK

Barnet, Hertfordshire