The King’s New Year Honour list for 2026 has been revealed, and for anyone looking for a pulse from the living end of British culture, it makes for oddly bloodless reading. Titles were conferred, sashes pinned, initials added. What is missing is harder to ignore: not a single practising artist appears anywhere on the list. For a sector that routinely trades on the language of creativity, risk and imagination, the absence feels less like an oversight than a statement.
At the top of the cultural roll call sits Sir Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, knighted for “services to museums”. Hunt, in post since 2017, has reshaped the V&A’s public-facing ambitions, most visibly with the opening of V&A East Storehouse in Stratford earlier this year, a project pitched as a radical rethinking of access, storage and display. He has also become one of the more vocal institutional figures arguing for structural change, including the introduction of a tourist levy to shore up Britain’s fragile cultural infrastructure. The knighthood confirms what was already clear: Hunt is now firmly part of the artistic establishment he once analysed as a historian.
Elsewhere on the list, Ekow Eshun receives an OBE. A former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and a widely respected curator and writer, Eshun’s influence has largely been felt through exhibitions, commissioning and public discourse rather than institutional empire-building. His honour, alongside that of Marcia Pointon, professor emerita of art history at the University of Manchester, is at least a nod to intellectual labour within the visual arts. But it remains telling that recognition stops at the level of interpretation and administration, not creation.
The remaining cultural awards skew decisively toward heritage management and governance. Hilary McGrady, director-general of the National Trust, is made a CBE. Her tenure has been defined as much by controversy as conservation, particularly following the Trust’s 2020 report examining its historical links to slavery and colonialism—a document that sparked political backlash while signalling a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. Susan Bowers, director of the Pilgrim Trust, receives an MBE for her work preserving heritage. In contrast, Janet Blake, a cultural heritage specialist based in Edinburgh, and Jo Quinton-Tulloch, director of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, are also awarded OBEs.
That is the list—a tight cluster of senior administrators, curators and heritage professionals. Three figures loosely connected to the art world, if one stretches the definition—Hunt, Eshun, Pointon—and none who actually make the work that fills the galleries these institutions exist to serve.
The disappointment is hard to disguise. Artists, after all, are not peripheral to British cultural life; they are its raw material. They generate the ideas, images and arguments that museums later frame, preserve and monetise. To honour only those who manage culture, while bypassing those who produce it, sends an uncomfortably clear signal about where value is currently perceived to lie.
This is not a new pattern, but its persistence is striking. The honours system has long favoured longevity, administration and “service”—a word that sits awkwardly with artistic practice, which is rarely obedient, polite or easily measurable. Artists do not slot neatly into citation language. They fail, contradict themselves, provoke offence, and change their minds. None of this translates well into a list designed to reward stability and consensus.
Yet the timing feels particularly off-key. British artists are working against a backdrop of collapsing studio provision, dwindling public funding, rising rents and an international market increasingly indifferent to anything that does not arrive pre-branded. Many are sustaining institutions by their presence alone—exhibiting, teaching, mentoring, holding the line—while receiving little structural support in return. To see their absence formalised in the honours list feels like a quiet snub.
The twice-yearly ritual of honours, handed out at New Year and again on the monarch’s official birthday, is often defended as symbolic rather than representative. But symbols matter. They reveal priorities. And this year’s message is unmistakable: culture is being thanked for its management, not its imagination.
Sir Tristram Hunt will wear his title comfortably and no doubt continue to argue for better funding and broader access. Ekow Eshun’s OBE will be widely welcomed by those who value serious, thoughtful engagement with contemporary art. But the larger picture remains oddly hollow. A cultural honours list with no artists on it is not neutral. It reflects a system that prefers caretakers to risk-takers, administrators to instigators.
For a country that prides itself on creative leadership, that should give pause.
Top Photo: Sir Tristram Hunt © Artlyst 2025