This is surreal. I’m standing in the new home of one of Britain’s most historically august cultural institutions, and it looks and feels for all the world like a silent disco.

There is a middle-aged white woman to my right, staring intently ahead, swaying gently and bobbing her head as rhythmically as the giant headphones covering her ears will allow. Behind me there is a young black woman, her hair pulled back to give the headset and whatever she is listening to untrammelled passage. She is swaying, rising a bit, then falling: in the room but in a world of her own. Behind me, I see a muscular guy of mixed heritage; his ripped torso is still, his head of braided hair is not, and his face gently creases as he smiles about what he is hearing. My feet are planted, but I’m aware that I’m giddy, as if slightly drunk. There we are, imbibing different musical clips of different things in different bits of semi-darkened galleries, and yet it is a shared endeavour.

Gallery director Gus Casely-Hayford is quite open about his driving intention to make a statement with The Music is Black, at the V&A East in east London. We have recurring arguments about the public provision of culture. Whose art is it anyway? Especially when it’s funded by the taxpayer.

Those set on ousting Misan Harriman from the Southbank Centre have many lines of attack, but one is undoubtedly the feared deprioritisation of artistic excellence as they perceive it. It is a spectre mockingly, anxiously described by one Spectator writer as “fewer orchestral concerts (boring) and many more groovy events”. That’s groovy as in lacking merit, by the way. Groovy as a cudgel.

It’s also laughably reductive. The Music is Black describes music that is not just interesting as culture on the periphery, but........

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