EVERY MONUMENT WILL FALL

The culture war is over If you want it to be It wasn t even a culture war it was a war on culture A sustained attack Dan Hicks argues in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums public art and even universities and one that has a deeper history than you might think Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art heritage memory and colonialism Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums including the one in which he is a curator Part history part biography part excavation the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War from the City of London to the University of Oxford revealing enduring legacies of militarism slavery racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture and how to find hope remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue or living in a past that we can never change the book makes