Subsidising the arts is not without its dangers, Ivan Hewett tells The Telegraph’s naysayers, but relying solely on the free market would be much worse.
'End all arts subsidy now!' It's the cry that goes up, every time an artist or musician does something so baffling or outrageous that it actually makes the news pages. In the UK, it's the sense that the public is being swindled or hoodwinked by pretentious obscurity that raises a red mist in the brains of free-market populists – as we saw in the comment pages of this newspaper last week.
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Theatre criticDouglas MacPherson was bored by a show in Norwich, and was provoked to take a big stick to arts subsidy, which he says inevitably produces boring art. In the US, the hostility to public subsidy takes on a more moral tinge. It's not so long ago that the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe provoked the outrage of Republican senators, who declared that his homoerotic photographs were an affront to 'American values'.
What unites these anti-subsidy lobbies is the conviction that the arts would be healthier and more democratic if they were ruled by public taste. Restore the economic nexus between consumer and producer via the boxoffice, they say, and truthfulness will be restored. The art that people actually like will flourish, and the rest will go to the wall. That, in a nutshell, was MacPherson's argument... Keep reading on The Telegraph
'End all arts subsidy now!' It's the cry that goes up, every time an artist or musician does something so baffling or outrageous that it actually makes the news pages. In the UK, it's the sense that the public is being swindled or hoodwinked by pretentious obscurity that raises a red mist in the brains of free-market populists – as we saw in the comment pages of this newspaper last week.
Theatre critic Douglas MacPherson was bored by a show in Norwich, and was provoked to take a big stick to arts subsidy, which he says inevitably produces boring art. In the US, the hostility to public subsidy takes on a more moral tinge. It's not so long ago that the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe provoked the outrage of Republican senators, who declared that his homoerotic photographs were an affront to 'American values'.
What unites these anti-subsidy lobbies is the conviction that the arts would be healthier and more democratic if they were ruled by public taste. Restore the economic nexus between consumer and producer via the boxoffice, they say, and truthfulness will be restored. The art that people actually like will flourish, and the rest will go to the wall. That, in a nutshell, was MacPherson's argument... Keep reading on The Telegraph