things will have to change

The secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a research and policy organisation that works on behalf of the world’s richest countries, has compared the prevailing elite posture to that of the fictional 19th-century Italian aristocrat Tancredi Falconeri, from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, who declares: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” If this view is correct, then much of today’s charity and social innovation and buy-one-give-one marketing may not be measures of reform so much as forms of conservative self-defence — measures that protect elites from more menacing change

– Researching and Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists (2020) edited by Christopher Wiley and Ian Pace