I have found an amazing article on arts and heritage funding. The writer, Nick Seddon discusses that 'there are a lot of people out there who resent their taxes being used to fund the arts. This much is clear from some of the more barbed comments on the Arts Council's website, where the agency is running a consultation into the future of public investment in the arts in this country. But sometimes it pays to be expedient: the Arts Council isn't going to be closed down any time soon, so let's cut our losses and try to ensure that it at least uses our money wisely. To this end, it would be good if we could come up with some sound principles on which to base public funding of the arts. Surely the underlying principle has to be quality. We might squabble about how quality is defined and, more contentiously, who defines it, but quality per se must be up there. We want good art, not bad art. We want art for art's sake...'
To read the whole article, click here:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/03/quality_not_social_value_shoul.html
To read the whole article, click here:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/03/quality_not_social_value_shoul.html
2 comments:
I think it's very important to use some of our taxes' money for art because art is a precious part of culture that we shouldn't forget about: understanding art is opening your mind to a vision and sometimes a message, and I believe that can help bringing some form of tolerance in the society. So I agree that we should promote to a larger audience the art called elitist, especially if it's a high quality one of course, and even if it's harder to understand than some plain but more accessible kind of art... The challenge is to find a way of efficiently PRing it to more than an elit!
The debate about arts funding is very topical.
Arts Minister, James Purnell MP -in the Guardian on Saturday (5 Jan 2008) - talked about a watershed moment - with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport about to publish a review of public arts funding put together by Sir Brian McMaster, chairman of the National Opera Studio and a former director of the Edinburgh festival.
The Minister hopes McMaster Review will bring about a "new renaissance" - "ushering in a new era in which the logic underlying public subsidy moves from "measurement to judgment".
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