Jorge Miguel Benitez

October 2025

No society is ever culturally monolithic despite outward appearances.

When the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016, it revealed fissures echoed in other developed societies. Less than 52 percent of the population chose to leave the EU, while Scotland and Northern Ireland chose to remain. The rural vote favored the British exit, or Brexit, while younger and often better educated city dwellers voted to remain in the EU. Exit polls showed that many pro-Brexit voters often had little understanding of what it entailed, and others professed that Brussels’ regulations were excessive while forgetting that they were often based on British laws. In addition, the anti-EU campaign was alleged to have been fraught with disinformation and misinformation spread through social media. The British Right had embraced a mostly American misreading of postmodern French theory that suggested that facts were impediments to the deeper truths of popular and personal feelings. As in other Western countries, the post-truth era had landed on the beaches of the United Kingdom. The arts had yet to enter the discussion.

In a January 2021 article published shortly after the United Kingdom had officially left the European Union, Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, former Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, told Artnet News: “So much of the art world has been shattered by COVID, by the temporary closure of public institutions and the laying off, particularly of younger staff, that it now feels totally gratuitous to have inflicted a further battery of disasters on ourselves.” The title of the article was phrased as a revealing question:

“The UK Has Officially Exited the EU with a Trade Deal. So What Exactly Does It Mean for the Art Business?”

The answer was straightforward. The arts would not escape the economic effects of Brexit. Yet there was one consideration that hinted at the cultural ramifications of Brexit. After addressing everything from value added taxes to e-commerce, Artnet News added: 

“Luís Raposo, the European president of ICOM, says that while the international museum organization has no official position on Brexit, he personally believes that it might make collaboration among museums more difficult. This could have an impact on hot-button issues like restitution, equity, and shared discourse—but most obviously, it will make it more challenging to transport artworks across the border. ‘We are afraid that itinerant exhibitions will be more expensive due to increasing costs in assurances.’”

Indeed, the cultural aspects would not escape the more vulgar economic effects. In reference to Brexit and without mentioning the arts, a contemporary article in The Guardian went for the jugular with prophetic implications for the rest of the West:  

“It is a form of coup, but with a cloud of nationalist hyperbole disguising the threat to parliamentary democracy. To hold power, or challenge it, in a democracy requires continual argument and discussion, the precondition of which is a commitment to truth-telling and a shared acceptance of facts, however differently they may be interpreted. Trash those preconditions and we inevitably slide into a universe of division and distrust impervious to rational argument. We are all belittled.”

It is indeed belittling for a country that, together with Scotland and France, spearheaded the Enlightenment to dismiss “a commitment to truth-telling and a shared acceptance of facts.” The great British empirical tradition appeared to have been killed on the scaffold of identitarian populism. Therefore, the effects of Brexit on the arts cannot be discussed outside the larger context of a general Western slide into tribalist self-immolation. 

Despite their democratic pretensions, populist movements tend to encourage mediocrity rather than liberty. Whenever the popular will is manifested through a fear of expertise and a distrust of cosmopolitanism, the result is usually a triumph of ignorance over accumulated knowledge, experience, empirical evidence, and understanding. What was presented as an egalitarian struggle against hierarchies with mysterious foreign links proves to be a regime of incompetence incapable of self-reflection and intolerant of criticism. To be fair, Brexit did not result in authoritarianism, but the motivations of its backers within a coalition of nationalist and mostly right-wing elements reflected notions that harked back to Sir Oswald Mosley and his admiration for National Socialism and Italian Fascism. The stain of volkisch purity was too dark to overlook. The pro-Brexit argument posited that England, in particular, was not part of Europe. The “continent” was impure, alien, and probably unclean. It did not matter that England itself was a product of European bloodlines and cultures. 

In a cynical revision of history, the anti-European faction sold Brexit as an expression of British independence from European colonial oppression. They failed to mention that if the United Kingdom was indeed a colonial victim of the European Union, then it should have sought autarchy, something beyond the capacity, not only of a small island nation, but of any developed country in the twenty-first century. Instead, the Brexiteers sought refuge in the fiction of a “special relationship” with the United States as a superior alternative to the benefits of European membership. The irony was beyond the imagination of the Brexit architects who sought power and profits wrapped in ethno-cultural purity. They forgot that the special relationship had always been transactional rather than authentically cultural, ethnocentric, or even sentimental. Like the wealthy American heiresses, whom John Singer Sargent portrayed with flattering bravura, the United States sought legitimacy and opportunity at the expense of British vulnerability. Impoverished British aristocrats needed American money, and American commoners bored with egalitarian republicanism sought aristocratic titles. Everyone profited from the transaction until the true cost became apparent; first, at the end of World War I, and later at the end of World War II. The United Kingdom did not finish paying its second war debt to the United States until December 31, 2006. That payment overlooked the transfer of one empire to another with the added insult of a colonial inversion.

Those who voted for Brexit in the hope of reviving the glories of a defunct British Empire had forgotten the American role in its dissolution after World War II. The United States wanted more than a repayment of war debts. It insisted on an end to British and French colonialism without considering the consequences of a premature imperial dissolution. The resulting chaos handed the imperial mantle to a country at odds with its contradictions and culturally ill-prepared to inherit the Franco-British legacy except in one area. Like the old East India Company, Wall Street knew how to fill an imperial vacuum even as Washington could barely grasp the situation. There was money to be made in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Brexiteers have yet to understand the nature of a “special relationship” in which they are sometimes reduced into the colonial subjects of an American hegemon. Hints of that future were already apparent in 1776.

Membership in the European Union, with its enormous single market for British goods and services, protected the United Kingdom from overreliance on trade with the United States. It also enhanced British soft power and overall cultural prestige, something that was in doubt when Amanda Cusimano and Jay Rowe published the following statement in 2020: “The impact for the UK will not only be felt on the visual arts market trade: high import and export costs could also endanger the quantity and quality of exhibitions available in the UK including touring exhibitions.” It remains to be seen whether or not “the quantity and quality of exhibitions” has suffered to the degree that was feared in 2020. Fortunately, the links to the continent need not be fully severed, especially since the European Union has left open the door to a British return to its European family. Freedom from the delusion of cultural autonomy and the quest for ethnic purity will ease the path to Europe. Recent polls suggest a rejection of the Brexit debacle. 

If the Napoleonic Wars and two world wars could not stop Anglo-European cultural exchanges, then there is little reason to fear that Brexit would sever British artistic ties to Europe. The larger question remains conceptual rather than transactional: can the British people rise above Brexit? After all, economics is only one aspect of art. Nor is there anything to fear from American cultural influence, unless it becomes an excuse for native complacency. Only the purists fear cultural exchanges; and to its credit, the United Kingdom has always been far from pure. A nation of global traders cannot be bound to something as petty as blood and soil. British history does not favor Brexit, especially since the willingness to transcend borders commercially, artistically, and intellectually has inspired the British imagination and changed the world. 

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