The Cracked Bell and the Curated Canvas

By Lana Sterling

The defining sound of London is not the roar of progress, nor the chatter of its globalised markets. It is the toll of a cracked bell. The sound of Big Ben, officially the Great Bell in the Elizabeth Tower, is the sound of a beautiful, persistent fiction. We tell ourselves it is the heartbeat of the nation, a symbol of stability and punctuality. The truth, of course, is that it is famously flawed, its iconic tone the result of a fracture sustained in 1859, a mere two months into its operational life. It is not a symbol of perfection, but of a compromise we have collectively agreed to call character.

This national attachment to a beautiful, broken thing is more than a quirk of tourism. It is the hermeneutic key, the interpretive tool that unlocks the entire cultural programme for 2024. For when you place the stolid, neo-Gothic romanticism of that clock tower alongside the frantic, forward-looking prospectus of London’s major art galleries, you discover not a contrast, but a terrifying continuity. Both are engaged in the same grand project: the relentless curation of the past as a sanctuary from the present. The city’s art scene, for all its talk of the new, is simply another face on the same old clock.

A Beautiful, Persistent Fiction

Let us first consider the monument. Augustus Pugin’s design for the tower was an act of deliberate nostalgia from its inception, a Victorian dream of a medieval past that never truly existed. It is a monument to a fantasy. We cherish its supposed accuracy, whilst knowing its mechanism requires the periodic addition or removal of old penny coins to keep it in check. It’s a fudge. We call the whole tower ‘Big Ben’ when that is merely the name of the bell. We celebrate its endurance, whilst conveniently forgetting the long silences for repairs. The entire narrative is a masterpiece of public relations.

I confess, I have a soft spot for the sheer, stubborn persistence of the thing. I once spent a damp Tuesday afternoon on Westminster Bridge, watching the rain lash its stoic, sand-coloured limestone, and felt the strange, irrational comfort it projects. But the comfort is the point. Big Ben is not a challenge. It is an affirmation, a 96-metre-high security blanket. It tells us that things, however imperfect, endure. This is the foundational myth of modern British culture.

This is the myth now being sold in the hushed, climate-controlled halls of our galleries. The London art prospectus for 2024 reads like a catalogue of managed dissent and pre-approved rebellion. The Tate Modern ‘reimagines’ Surrealism; the Saatchi Gallery ‘explores’ Street Art; the Hayward ‘delves into’ Conceptual Art. These are not discoveries, but exhumations. They are the artistic equivalents of a Big Ben restoration project: polishing a piece of the past until it gleams, safely removing it from its messy, urgent context and presenting it for our quiet consumption.

The British cultural establishment is less a laboratory for the future and more a lovingly maintained heritage railway of the soul, running scheduled services to all the most scenic moments of twentieth-century upheaval.

The Heritage Railway of the Soul

The journey is a comfortable one. At the National Gallery, we can be ‘unveiled’ to diversity. At the Tate Britain, we can witness the ‘breaking of boundaries’ by feminist artists. At the Photographers’ Gallery, we can see social change ‘documented’. Each exhibition promises a frisson of political seriousness, a dose of historical weight. Yet the overwhelming effect is one of pacification.

The counter-argument, of course, is that this focus is a vital act of historical redress, bringing marginalised stories into the heart of the national conversation. This is true. But the method of this redress matters. By packaging these vital, often furious, movements into thematic blockbusters, the institution performs a subtle act of neutering. It is the curatorial equivalent of placing a lion in a beautifully appointed cage: we can admire its magnificent teeth from a safe distance, secure in the knowledge that the zookeepers have everything under control. The art is no longer a Molotov cocktail; it’s a museum piece about Molotov cocktails.

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but this process transforms art from a verb into a noun. It ceases to be an act of doing and becomes a thing to be seen. It offers the London gallery-goer a curated conscience. One can wander through an exhibition of protest art, feel a pleasing sense of solidarity with the protestors, and then pop into the gift shop to buy a tea towel. The experience is contained. It does not spill out into the streets, because it is fundamentally about the past. It is a history lesson, not a call to arms.

This is where the flawed majesty of Big Ben and the curated radicalism of the Tate converge. Both are profoundly conservative gestures, masquerading as something else. Big Ben pretends to be a symbol of steadfast order, when it is, in fact, an emblem of our talent for muddling through. The 2024 exhibition schedule pretends to be a brave engagement with challenging ideas, when it is, in fact, a retreat into the established canon of ‘challenging ideas’. Both reassure us that rebellion, diversity, and social change are things that can be catalogued, contained, and ultimately, historicised. They are no longer threats to the established order; they are wings of the museum.

In an anxious, fractured, post-Brexit Britain, a nation unsure of its place in the world, our cultural institutions have decided their primary role is therapeutic. They are here to soothe us with the familiar, whether it’s the chime of a cracked bell or the sight of a Banksy stencil safely behind glass. They offer us a vision of our culture not as a dynamic, unpredictable force, but as a vast, well-managed archive. And the greatest illusion of all is that by wandering its aisles, we are somehow participating in the march of history. We are not. We are just admiring the monuments.