The arts can survive, and thrive, without public money
The arts can survive, and thrive, without public money - Telegraph
|
Quote:
|
There has been a long-running debate, at times quite heated, about public funding of the arts. One popular argument goes: why should bus drivers pay taxes to subsidise rich people to attend an opera at Covent Garden? (This assumes that no bus driver supports the opera; I prefer to believe that is not true.) The counter-argument runs something like this: putting on plays, art exhibitions, concerts, making films and, indeed, staging operas is so expensive that without public subsidy, it often wouldn’t happen, and if it didn’t, we would be a nation of boors (and, quite possibly, bores too). This assumes that such public funding as we have had since 1945, when the Arts Council’s predecessor sprang into life, has done much to civilise us: as I look around, I have my doubts. What we have here is one of those exceptionally rare things – an argument to which there genuinely are two sides.
Next Sunday evening, some soloists of the London Philharmonic Orchestra are giving a chamber concert in Cambridge, at the Cambridge Union, with a programme of Mozart, Richard Strauss and Schubert. The concert is sponsored by the Telegraph Media Group, which also brings you this newspaper: details of how to get tickets are at the end of this article. It is one of a series of such concerts that the orchestra was keen to promote, in order to give more exposure to some of its finest players. In the same way that Test batsmen improve more by playing matches than by any amount of practice in the nets, so musicians become even better through the discipline of live performance. The LPO has been fortunate to find other businesses to sponsor other concerts in the series. Times are hard in the private sector; but many firms, such as the one I work for, realise the importance of contributing more widely to the community, and recognise such sponsorship as part of the social dimension that any modern business should have.
I have no doubt that, in all fields of the arts, this is the best way forward. We no longer live in the days when a wide selection of wealthy patrons could shower money on a playwright, painter or composer and effectively keep them in business for years, as happened with Shakespeare or Bach. But in a time of economic stringency, it is too much to expect a state that must provide hospital beds, school places, police and soldiers to pay for dance ensembles, theatre groups and “community projects”. The arts are crucial to the development of our civilisation; but their development can begin from the community itself, from a combination of private individuals and corporations, rather than being some sort of extension of the welfare state.
When I heard the bleating and whining a few weeks ago from those whose enterprises had been cut off at the knees by reductions in Arts Council funding, I was extremely disheartened. The state is not the only body at whom the begging bowl can be directed, and if whatever these organisations are producing is of real merit and worth they will, like the LPO, find patrons in the private sector who are willing to support them, and link the reputation of their brands with that of the organisation.
To be fair, this happens widely already. Covent Garden has had a long-standing and highly successful fundraising programme, its worldwide prestige encouraging certain enormously wealthy people to give very substantial sums for the opera and the ballet. Impresarios in the West End take big financial risks themselves, or assemble teams of investors, to put on plays and musicals. Museums often have generations of benefactors behind them.
In a great city like London, such private benefactions can become clouded in anonymity; in smaller towns, where people struggle (and it often is a struggle) to keep theatres, galleries, concert halls or even small cinemas going, a serious sponsor can make the most enormous difference. Small orchestras, museums and theatre groups have become much more effective in the last 20 or 30 years at appealing to their patrons to recognise the economic realities of their existence.
This means, bluntly, saying to them that if you have enjoyed coming to this exhibition and looking at the sculptures or paintings, or you have enjoyed the concert, the play, the film or the ballet, then you may feel the need to volunteer your money or your time to ensure that such things continue to be provided. This is because, for the most part, the punter gets his or her ticket cheaply, however much it may seem to the contrary in some cases, and there has to be some element of subsidy if the thing is to be done at all. Spectacles are expensive.
The difficult part of the arts subsidy argument is one of quality control. One reason why the Arts Council has a dismal reputation in some quarters is that it has often given money to groups for what appear to be reasons of political or social engineering rather than to encourage quality. Nor is this confined to the Arts Council: the unlamented British Film Council had a hand in The King’s Speech, but it also had a hand in a lot of unutterable rubbish, some of which barely got distributed or even made it to DVD. Much of what they produced was of the Left-wing, self-hating variety, whose existence reminds us of one of the reasons why the contemporary French cinema is so much better than our own. Too many second-rate “artists” – be they screenwriters, directors, choreographers, “installation artists” or composers – were enabled to make a living purely because the state chose to subsidise their profoundly second-rate outpourings.
How, some say, can what is commercially successful be equated with what is an artistic achievement? It can’t. But after the age of great patrons, and before the era of state subsidy, writers, composers, painters and others developed their reputations while earning a living from teaching, or even (in T S Eliot’s case) working as a director of a publishing company. Really first-rate creative types will always find clients – think of Benjamin Britten, who had people queuing up to have him compose for them when he was barely out of his teens. This is a provocative thing to say, but there are sufficient civilised types working in the private sector who know quality when they see it and who can, even in hard times, be prevailed upon to support it. And I would rather trust their judgment in these matters than that of the functionaries of the state.
Tickets for the LPO Cambridge Concert on May 15, sponsored by the Telegraph, are available from the Cambridge Corn Exchange, telephone 01233 357851.
|
Apologies for product placement.
Not sure I entirely agree, but he argues it well. The problem is that the bit of culture that actually makes money is pop culture. If we get what he wants Covent Garden'll be doing musicals based on One Direction songs six nights a week with a prestige piece the seventh and Heffer'll have kittens at the dumbing down of it all...
__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.
|
Linear Mode
