Subsidies for the Arts

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Until the recent banking bail-out, the Arts were at the very front of the queue for getting public money. And of course, if you suggested that they might bugger off, you'd have been called a Philistine. I know that Hitler burned the books but that had nothing to do with the destruction of art: it was politics. Goering after all looted pretty much anywhere the Nazis conquered for its paintings. And as far as I know, the Nazis took the Amber Room in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg to bits and buried it somewhere we have never found.

The Arts community just doesn't seem to feel the need to justify its greed. It operates on the principle that 'art is good' so cough up. I mean we have just forked out £50m for Titian's painting 'Diana and Actaeon'. 'Saved for the nation,' is the cry. Did anyone ask me or my neighbours or my friends if they wanted it saved? Of course not for they know the answer they'd have got. Better still, they might have given us a choice - 'Diana and Actaeon' or Cat Rescue and I still reckon the cats would have won. And in any case, it's not a picture I'd have rushed to see. If you go round the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, you'll see enough fat naked women with big feet to last a lifetime.

Oh and having secured that money, they have the brass-necked cheek to hand out the begging bowl for another £50m to 'save' its sister painting, Diana and Callista.

There's a lot of hand wringing down here in Wales about the fact that the sponsors of the annual Brecon Jazz Festival have gone bust. It seems that great efforts are being made to ressurect it in 2010. Fine, get on with it. Three options: charge those '70,000 visitors from around the world' a bit more, pay the performers less (the world is not exactly crying out for jazz concerts) or cut costs all round.

I could move on to opera subsidies but that would take a book.

For most of us, David Attenborough, Harry Potter, Teletubbies and the Beano are quite enough to keep us entertained.

The bottom line with Arts funding is that its insatiable and completely unjustifiable to anyone but those pretentious buggers who think it is more important than starvation in Africa.