Nothing embodies this spirit of cultural and ethical vandalism more than their embrace of pretentious modern art. They set themselves up as the arbiters of taste, yet they have no standards, no appreciation of beauty, no respect for craft. Their puerile desire to shock is matched by the malignant impulse to celebrate the vulgar and vacuous.

A disturbing example of this attitude lies in the choice of the latest new artistic object to fill the empty fourth plinth in Londons Trafalgar Square.

Given that this is one of the most famous sites in the world, dominated by the majesty of Nelsons column and the classical grandeur of the National Gallery, the chosen sculpture should have been something inspiring.

Instead, it is predictably degrading.

In a move that resembles a sick joke rather than a considered decision, the commissioning body for the plinth opted for a giant representation of a swirl of whipped cream, complete with a cherry on top, a drone on one side and a fly on the other.

If this is the best that British artists can produce, then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bull****

Labour Minister Kim Howells on the Turner Prize

Unveiled last week, this nine-feet tall frivolous piece of tat could hardly be in greater contrast to the magnificence of either Nelsons statute by Edward Hodges Baily or the four great bronze lions at the column's base, by Sir Edwin Landseer.

Mind you, those sublime works must have grown used to the parade of mediocrity that has filled the fourth plinth in recent years, including a blue cockerel and a human hand with an elongated thumb.

This latest depressing effort is by the artist Heather Phillipson, who, like so many of the avante-garde, is indifferent to the richness of Britain's past.

"I only knew Trafalgar Square from protests," she said in a recent interview, during which, typically, she wore anti-Tory badges.

With equal inevitability, she says the work was driven by a feeling of doom provoked in 2016 by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

"We've been at a point of some kind of entropy for some time", she claimed portentously.

So much modern art represents a two-fingered salute to the mainstream public by privileged insiders and their cheerleading critics.

Indeed, art is hardly the word for this drivel, which requires no real skill to make and has no aesthetic merit.

Only a movement without integrity would honour works like Tracey Emins unmade bed or Martin Creed's Number 227, which comprises a room where the lights go on and off every five minutes.

Some fashionable offerings are wilfully offensive, like Chris Olifi's "hip-hop" portrait of the Holy Virgin Mary, made with elephant dung and cuttings from pornographic magazines.

In 2002, the brave Labour Minister Kim Howells said of the Turner Prize show, "If this is the best that British artists can produce, then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bull****."

Those words have even more resonance today, as the arts sink ever deeper into the mire of self-indulgent crassness.

And this is where the western canon has ended up.

Europe once produced Da Vinci and Monet, Britain Turner and Constable.

Now, the British arts establishment revels in whipped cream, vomit and Marxist gyrations.

If a society can be judged by the art it leaves behind, then we are living in a truly decadent age.

That decadence incorporates an obsession with modernity and a determination to re-write the past.

Brimming with misplaced superiority, the elitists treat our heritage, not with any reverence, but as a vehicle for their own virtue-signalling propaganda.

That is why they want to pull down statues, demolish period buildings, "decolonise" the school curriculum and remove works of arts.

The little known Left-wing writer Afua Hirsch even called for Nelson's column to be torn down on the grounds that the great admiral was "a white supremacist."

Similarly, Labour's Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy recently demanded that several epic murals be removed from the Foreign Office in Whitehall because of their imperialist imagery.

This sort of nonsense has to be resisted.

The architecture, sculpture and visual art that survive from previous centuries are far better than today's embarrassing, fraudulent output.

The cream on the fourth plinth is an unappetising symbol of decline.

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Liberal elite wouldnt know proper art if it smacked them in the face, says LEO McKINSTRY - Daily Express