Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal

Calls to expand public investment in the arts often treat the existing cultural and institutional landscape as a given. Defund Culture challenges this assumption, asking instead what kinds of culture are being supported, through which institutions, and to whose benefit. In pursuing these questions, the book turns attention to the structural inequalities that shape Britain’s creative and intellectual life. Drawing on critical theory, political philosophy, and cultural policy, Gary Hall shows how the dominance of white, male, middle- and upper-class voices in the arts, media, and academy is sustained through longstanding funding arrangements and institutional hierarchies. Expanding access within this system—however well intentioned—will not, on its own, produce structural change. Rather than offering a programme of reform, Defund Culture explores what it might mean to disinvest from cultural institutions as they currently operate. Taking cues from abolitionist calls to defund the police, Hall proposes redistributing resources away from elite institutions and toward more collective, commons-oriented, and radically relational alternatives grounded in redistribution, institutional transformation, and epistemic pluriversality.