Anne Desmet answered Adams’ points pretty comprehensively in her November letter, and I’ve got nothing to add. All I will say is that for a campaigner against identitarianism and its culture of victimhood, Adams’ whole project had a whiff of male victimhood about it. I’m also unconvinced that feminism, in the broad sense of the

Not Found term, can be defined as identitarian. Being

female is not an identity – not yet at least – it’s a gender. You can’t lump women together as ‘victims’ with ethnic or sexual minorities when you’re talking about half the population.

I won’t deny that it’s tough being a white male artist today; I have every sympathy for any non-ethnic minority man trying to make his way in the art world as currently constituted. I know of one white mid-career male artist who recently had a show at a regional gallery cancelled because the organisers felt they couldn’t justify spending public money on an artist from such a historically privileged group, and confessed as much. Adams is right to campaign against arts funding being devoted to social engineering. But although the constant liberal checking of white male privilege grates, it’s arguable that a correction is overdue. Plus the alternative is not an appealing prospect. Who knows what the fate of arts funding will be under the regency of Demonic Cummings, when he’s finished with the BBC? So far the visual arts have been beneath his liberal-tracking radar. Be careful what you wish for.

Time to call a truce? Imbalances naturally tend to level out. At the present rate of consumption galleries will run out of dead women artists unless curators do some serious research to dig out new ones. Those so far unearthed have been of uneven quality. The Baroque painter Michaelina Wautier, dusted off by the Rubens House in Antwerp in 2018, looks a serious contender, but the Renaissance nun Plautilla Nelli being promoted – and expensively restored – by a bunch of bien-pensante Americans in Florence marching under the banner of Advancing Women Artists is an obvious dud. The pages of Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race are sprinkled with muzzy monochrome photographs of paintings by forgotten women, some of whom – like Giovanna Garzoni with her exquisite Dish of Broad Beans – clearly merit further investigation, and maybe the funding will now be forthcoming.

Of living women artists there is obviously no shortage. But, as Anne Desmet points out, despite increasing parity in public gallery exposure women remain poorly represented by top-end dealers, who find it a fag to get their prices up – a difficulty that will persist until there are equal numbers of women collectors. Women may represent half the population, but the moneyed half doesn’t always want to buy what they choose to represent. One reason why women abstract artists like Bridget Riley and Gillian Ayres fare better in a male-dominated market than their figurative peers is that their work does not reflect female experience. The truth, and I may be trolled for telling it – except that I’m not on social media, tee-hee – is that men’s art tends to appeal to men and women’s art to women. What woman collector would want a late period Picasso?

If this is a problem, it will only be solved when the idea of there being two sexes loses its appeal. Call me old-fashioned, but I hope