Band dedicate song to Glasgow School of Art after fire

Why does the arts subsidy have to be cut in order for spending on education to be maintained?Why not scrap Trident instead, or HS2? Or why not make tax collection more efficient and effective? 

Also, great arts institutions like the National Galley, or the BM, are there for the benefit of all - if people choose not to visit them, it's up to them.

As a former professional classical musician, I find your last paragraph somewhat surprising. Surely art enriches and benefits all, and should be accessible to all, not just those who can afford it. Or are you actually supporting elitism?

Dear Kevin.

The British Museum and the National Gallery should charge enough entrance fee to pay for themselves, or shut. As you say if people don't go in then it is indeed up to them, and these institutions will have outlived their usefulness and should therefore close down, and be sold off, as it will make no difference for the absolute majority of those who pay for them.

ATB from George

Dear Nigel.

If the subsidies actually meant the prices to buy tickets for concerts were affordable then that would be one thing. 

As it is the general Tax-payer is subsidising an elite already. That is not on in my view.

I am a great supporter of amateur music making. No Tax-payer contribution required.

ATB from George

I give up, disappointed that you seem to have become George Osborne. I'm astonished that you can possibly suggest that some of the greatest art in Britain should be reserved for those with deep pockets. Has your Forum name been taken over by an imposter?

Total Arts Council funding in 2012-13 was £310m. Out of a total Govt expenditure budget of £720,000m the same year (about 0.043%, if my rather wonky maths is correct), that's not a lot of money, is it?

In the same year, we paid subsidies to non-UK farmers (via the EU Common Agricultural Policy) of £1,200m.

This year, the amount lost to the taxpayer by Vince Cable and his cabal of cretins in the ideologically-driven sell-off of Royal Mail is, even by the most conservative estimate, upwards of a billion pounds.

Dear Nigel,

Given that most people here and in general enjoy their music most of the time via recordings. I don't see the problem.

You don't have to spend very much to get nice music in the home. This is not something that would force music into an elitist and cost exclusive pursuit!

Indeed it has never been more democratic and less elitist. 

And it is free choice. But supporting professionally institutionalised opera and symphony orchestra music as presently is an absurdity. The music would carry on and the standard of live performance would, I am prepared to guess, not be significantly reduced. After all the current player who are good enough will continue to get their fee stiffening amateur players, and the whole effort will become much more economically sound, without costing those who would never go within a country miles of a live subsidised musical concert will no longer have to pay. 

That is fair. Life is not always fair, but we should strive to make life fairer over time.

ATB from George

Nigel, the spirit of good old fashioned toxic English philistinism is obviously alive and well on this forum - and in the shape of a musician too. It is terribly disappointing...

Dear Kevin.

Soon we shall have a General Election. I am sure that some of this will figure in the result!

For myself, I like politicians who want to reduce the size of the State as proportion of National Income and Wealth. Arts funding is not the only area I would like to see trimmed or abolished altogether.

Arts funding is a huge some of money. It is part of a much larger sum of money. The total has to be significantly reduced over time, and we had better start with the luxuries in my view.

Earlier you will find a post where I outline what I consider the State should be doing. So as to be clear on that.

ATB from George

Most (99.9%) politicians want to do this, George, it is the neoliberal orthodoxy. They always reduce the wrong thing, though, and end up flogging off non-fungible services and assets of long-term value to the nation on the cheap. To our detriment and the enrichment of a few.

You should join the libertarian Left, or become an anarcho-syndicalist. Neoliberalism will be dead (hopefully I will live long enough to see it perish) soon enough, because it is a corrupt and intellectually bankrupt ideology.

That sounds like a ponzi or pyramid scheme to me - and those never end happily.

Dear Kevin,

Amateur orchestra players pay a subscription that covers the cost of hiring the rehearsal venue and concert hall, and the paying of certain key professional players, as well as incidental costs like music hire.

It works well. Amateur Choirs work the same way. Their subscription also covers the raising of an ad hoc orchestra that is often fully professional. 

These arrangements mean that the tickets are cheap and no subsidy from the general Tax-payer is required. It is not only a model for the future but one with a successful history over centuries.

Leave the massive costs of the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics to others in my opinion.

ATB from Geroge

They do it because if they don't the backlog will make everything else unmanageable.  Every job within a council parks department from cutting grass round an average tree, to hoeing a patch of land, to cutting a hedge, to painting a piece of equipment, to digging a grave has been extensively checked by time and motion.  Every single job has a time.

They have ledgers full of timings for all the jobs they have and know roughly how many hours it takes to do the entire work the parks department are responsible for.  They then calculate that against the number of workers they have so any lost days due to weather puts a huge strain on the system.

George

Sorry to be bating you, and further wandering off topic, but how do you feel about public funding of sport? I mean at grass roots 'public' level rather then elite athletes/events. My cricket club receives a variety of grants and support that helps us maintain facilities etc.

I also wondered how you felt about Lottery funding of arts etc.

Bruce

Yes but George, I want to know why you are so obsessed with what are, in the great scheme of things, fairly small costs. The benefits that art and culture bring to both individuals and society are not always directly measurable (which is why bean-counters, philistines and the overly-literal-minded dislike them and always want to cut them)  but they are valuable and worth preserving as a public - and publicly-funded - good.

Also, how do you propose to fund the visual arts with the method described above? Or do you think that great collections which belong to the nation and the regions (the National Gallery, the Tates, BM, NPG, V&A, Wolverhampton Art Gallery [one of the best in the country - fact!], the Walker, Kelvingrove, etc etc) should just be broken up and sold off? What good is that going to do this country, and future generations?

And another question for you - what do you make of public funding for non-artistic institutions which are of cultural (or educative) significance - such as, to grab just two random examples out of the air, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum?

But our 'village green' requires maintenance. Equipment is required. Our changing rooms need maintenance too. The grants we secure are conditional on engaging with local schools and encouraging diversity. These principles are far more crucial when supporting sport in urban areas as healthy recreation and a positive behaviour. Those clubs (for whatever sport) especially will lack for volunteers and financial support from members where we may be luckier-yet I'd say they have great potential for good.

Dear Kevin,

I am no more obsessive about the huge budget of the Arts Council than any number of other publicly funded wastes of money.

Only a very wealthy person would call the Arts budget other than huge. The National annual spend of the government of Tax payers' money is of course vastly greater as it includes many vital activities that could not possibly be efficiently or adequately organised in any other way. I need no list them, I am sure.

I am going to mention one that is not nearly well enough provided in the UK. Education. As a mature and long cultured Nation, it should be possible for our school children to be at the top of the World leagues. We are falling far behind the best in this. It seems to me incredible that children can - in modern UK spend more than ten years in education and perfectly intelligent young people can leave school unable to read well or do basic arithmetic accurately. 

It is clear to me that the balance of spending and administration is quite wrong. Until education is at a level commensurate with at least the best of our European neighbours, then I think we should be taking a radical look at rebalancing the budget. My first target would be the Arts Council. It is a fat lot go good sending some illiterate and in-numerate school child off to a some State subsidised Theatre to watch a play that is going to go straight over their head given the failure of education to get through to them.

On the musical issue. The kinds of music that are subsidised tend to those high cost types that are elitist and exclusive of all but a tiny minority of the population. This another example of the failure of perspective on the issue.

Music would not disappear if it had to be self-sustaining economically. It would change. But amateur music making is often far more adventurous and often just as fine as the State subsidised sort.

I hope that helps you understand my point of view just a bit. But before you take me for some " bean-counter[s], philistine[s] and the overly-literal-minded" type of person please let me remind you of a reply I made to you on the Proportional Representation Thread, page two. If you cannot find it, I'll repost it for you. It concerns the nature of capitalism, and was posted on 25 th. May, 2014 at 3:09 PM.

ATB from George

The Council for which I work is full of dedicated people working extremely hard to provide good services in the face of ever decreasing resources. I don't think any of my colleagues deserve to be called morons.

Perhaps if you shared your profession with us, and I'm sure it's very useful, others could act like small children and abuse you.

Cheers George, as ever we disagree most politely!

I guess my response to your thoroughly reasonable post above is to say that I don't see why you feel comfortable giving state support for sport but not for the arts. Personally I think both deserving. I don't think the arts are a 'luxury', If we ever descend to the level when we treat them as such I think we will be much the poorer for it.

ATB as they say

Bruce

George

I believe that there it a societal benefit in the creation and enjoyment of culture, be it in the visual, written, performing or musical arts; consequently access to culture should be universal, and free at the point of access. The market cannot be trusted to enable this, so the state has to do it. Simple as that.

As a lower-middle class grammar school boy, I can attest to the power and benefit of free access to culture: visits to free museums, galleries, libraries and the like; which has enriched my life in ways too numerous to explain here. And so, I suspect can millions of other people. Stil, no point in thar if it saves

You are welcome to your pinched, stultifying and philistine vision, it is part of a tired political and economic orthodoxy. 

If your proposals ever comes to pass here, I'll move abroad.

By the way, please stop talking about the funding of art/culture and education as if they were mutually exclusive, or a zero-sum game. They are not. In fact, there is a very strong argument for free and open access to culture as an important part of the educative process.

No orders issued - merely a polite (note the "please") request, which you are free to ignore if you so choose. Just as you a free to choose to ignore the fact that funding of arts/culture and of education are not mutually exclusive, as you seem to consistently argue.

I believe that throughout this thread you have largely - but not always, to be fair - talked crap, and I think that your ideas are badly thought out, your arguments flawed and are, at root, depressingly philistine.You seem to be obsessed with cost, rather than understanding value.

I never said anywhere that you weren't entitled to hold your views, or to express them. Or to disagree with my own views, which are, it seems, the complete opposite of yours.

George, must you consistently cherry-pick from mine and other people's quotes in order to your bolster your own arguments?

For example you say above that I "insist on Arts spending becoming part of Educational spending". I did no such thing - I actually said there was a very strong argument for doing so. That's rather different from what you have misrepresented me as saying, but you knew that, didn't you?

People - not me, of course - might start wondering if you're resorting to deliberately misrepresenting people because your own position is flawed and feeble.