For years now I have watched the public room narrow, first by inches, then by panicked lurches as books vanish from shelves and artists are told gently that perhaps now is not the time. This weekend of readings and marches is, at its best, a refusal to let that room close without witnesses. One cannot underestimate the power of six hundred small spaces declaring in unison that they will not apologise for being complicated, difficult, disobedient. Yet it is also true that many of the institutions involved have practised their own forms of silence, excluding awkward artists long before the censors arrived. If Fall of Freedom is to mean anything, it must be the beginning of a wider reckoning, not only with governments and donors, but with the habits inside the galleries themselves. Otherwise we will have thrown a beautifully lit party at the edge of a cliff.