At the Conservative Party Conference, Sam West explains exactly why culture matters, how it can be used to build a better nation, and issues a rallying cry to end cuts to local authority budgets.
Asked to prove the value of culture, I sometimes do a sneaky inversion. Imagine a world without it. Imagine throwing a switch which at a stroke removed all creativity from the world.
No bedtime stories; no Wallace and Gromit, no soap operas – the writers that wrote them never got started. No comedy gigs, no orchestras (what would they play? There’s no music). No films, no fashion, no dance, no video games, no poetry. The Olympic opening ceremony would be reduced to Boris Johnson cutting a ribbon. It’s a nightmare vision.
So we can’t do without it. But what does Culture even mean? For some, it means a thing that happens after a glass of wine in the evenings. Increasingly for others it’s a word for our outputs, our product – the addition of something valuable to our lives. If we’re to think of it as intrinsic, as part of who we are, we need to make access to it easier... Keep reading on Arts Funding Information
Asked to prove the value of culture, I sometimes do a sneaky inversion. Imagine a world without it. Imagine throwing a switch which at a stroke removed all creativity from the world.
No bedtime stories; no Wallace and Gromit, no soap operas – the writers that wrote them never got started. No comedy gigs, no orchestras (what would they play? There’s no music). No films, no fashion, no dance, no video games, no poetry. The Olympic opening ceremony would be reduced to Boris Johnson cutting a ribbon. It’s a nightmare vision.
So we can’t do without it. But what does Culture even mean? For some, it means a thing that happens after a glass of wine in the evenings. Increasingly for others it’s a word for our outputs, our product – the addition of something valuable to our lives. If we’re to think of it as intrinsic, as part of who we are, we need to make access to it easier... Keep reading on Arts Funding Information