I imagine the managers of Edinburgh Fringe venue Summerhall are very confused right now.

People complain, action is taken, then there are even more complaints about the action taken to the complaints. Desperate to make everyone happy, they are certainly making no one happy.

In the midst of several ‘cancel culture’ rows floating around Edinburgh’s festivals, bosses at Summerhall have given ample ammo to tedious discourse warriors by altering a commissioned 2017 mural by artist Jane Frere that featured anti-Nazi symbols and slogans, with a pertinent update after Donald Trump’s win in the US election last year.

Frere’s mural is, clearly, a work explicitly critiquing the rise of fascism. A smudged swastika and an SS boot were the elements of the piece that supposedly offended. Staff and a handful of public complainants were reportedly “deeply offended and distressed”.

Frankly, I’m not sure if these staff members and members of the public have just the slightest sense of visual literacy, given how direct and unsubtle a message the mural conveys.

The art itself, and what it is expressing, is hardly controversial or surprising. Since the rise of Trump in politics, there has been a plethora of anti-Trump art, usually based around sloganeering borrowed from American liberals.........

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