h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well the tatters that bind us together would unravel even more if the fabric of our artistic heritage werent actively preserved and new works that reflect our society now were'nt commissioned.

Shakespeare's works are suported in a suprising way not simply by grants to the RSC but by it being on the curriculm so often. Schools will spend millions on keeping it alive in our collective mindset on top of what is paid to actors, directors, props makers, lighting electricians and the people who sit in the box office.

Lets not forget that a lot of the West Ends purpose aside from culturally enriching us with theatre is to bring ni or atleast help bring in tourists.

As for the ballet I cant understand it but that doesnt make it not worth funding. The people who earn a living making ballet shoes might no understand it either but Im sure they are glad that its funded.

I cant get over howmany people stil hold on to the concept that "money" can be wasted its an abstract concept. you can fritter away energy and resources on Trident but the money you spen it keeps running round and round the sluice gates and channels of the owrlds financial systems. It doesnt disappear.

The Arts provide useful chances for people to develope interprsonal and intrapersonal skills, physical skills and to earn a living doing something positive. Take them away or let "the Market" decideon tyheir survival and we could lose something that enriches life for us all. Even if you have never been to the opera you can probably hum Nessun Dorma and possibly know someone whose personality has been improved by their self reflection after seeing a painting hearing a recital or whatever.

one love

Let's be clear - the arts will not disappear if public money is pulled. They would change however. There would be less avante garde works in some ways, but I think Theatre de Complicitie will always find an outlet. Probably cos it's interesting, fun and entertaining and therefore in demand. Opera & ballet will survive, precisely because of the corporate attraction mentioned earlier. London's West End receives very little public money - it's a commercial enterprise. And what a success story that is.

Public money actually stifles the arts in many ways. Councils don't quite have a veto on work, but they can limit future funding. No rep director is going to annoy his employers too much. Commercial theatre has a different paymaster - the public. The reason why *every* repertory theatre in the country runs at a loss is because they can. At the end of each year they present their shortfall to the council and say "Give us this or we'll close". Councils, after a bit of mumping and moaning, usually pay up in full. If a commercial production is crap, nobody pays to see it and it closes.

Withdraw public funding from the performing arts tomorrow and, once the lovey squealing has died down, we'll see 90% of the dross that plays to empty houses replaced with vibrant, challenging and entertaining work.

imo of course.

Yeah its your opinion that its dross and maybe it is.

I watch people playing really poor standards of sport all the time the commercial realities would mean that without the funding from thousands of fans and advertising the land they use to play sport badly on would be sold to build houses, but it isnt because of central funding.

The quality of the productions isnt the issue its the doing being part of and knowing its there even if you only watch rarely and dont enjoy it that makes the difference.

We can all say how the NHS does a bad job but no one in their right mind other than perhaps the shareholders adn directors of BUPA want its funding pulled.

You are rabidly against anything you see as a waste of time, which would be a great position to hold if you werent so pathetically short sighted in your outlook.

Like I said there are many people who not only relyon theatre for their livelihoods but have the qualityof their life enriched by something you think is crap.

The bottom line and even the quality of the product isnt the only measure of somethings worth. Ask any mother who has a handmade mothersday card where none of the wrting is legible and the "kitten" on the front looks like it might have been in an accident involving a fully laden 18 wheeler truck. It is not going to sell for millions and unless their is a craty play by some subversiveYBA it wont ever be seen as a materpeice but it is priceless to the recipient and a valuable lesson for the maker.

Now either genuinely or for the saek of stirring a hornets nest you are wearing the hat of a tightfisted tax payer. One who has little appreciation of the economy as a whole or of what peoples experiences are worth to us as a nation.

one love

Here we go - black/white again. This gets incredibly boring after a while.

Note I emphasised the arts would not disappear, but would change. And it's not my judgement of whether something's crap that matters, it's the theatre-going, ticket-buying public that counts. And they visibly judge some shows as being crap by not going to the theatre and not buying a ticket. There are tens, if not hundreds of these shows on tonight. They play to nine or ten people, often relatives or easily bribed friends of the cast. You might say this is fine - the show goes on, but that production is hogging resources that could be utilised by production companies putting on shows that people actually want to see. They only exist because they got a fat cheque from the Arts Council.

An area which may be more relevant to you Blicky is TIE, currently mainly supported by the Arts Councils. In my view, they work to an educational remit and should therefore be funded from an education budget.

As to the "Straw Man" argument earlier Az - most theatres, museums and galleries get their funding from the local council who finance them through the council tax. Why should 90,000 people in a town pay X extra on their council tax to fund the artistic pleasures of no more than a few hundred aesthetes?

>Why should 90,000 people in a town pay X extra on their council tax to fund the artistic pleasures of no more than a few hundred aesthetes?<

'cos that's what civilisations do.

If you dont like what I post then dont read what I ifts getting boring the smae goes...But are you trying to say that I do this on purpose?

There are plenty of threads where I dont disagre with you or any number of people. Here and on a number of other threads I do aside from you not liking views that oppose you own what is the problem?

I know "the Arts" wont disappear i didint say they would, but the accessibility to a certain level of arts resources would become vanishingly distant to many people.

I hate it when idiots ramble on about funding for sports after the Olympics or the Englsih football team go out of whatever tournament at the QFs that is only the tip of a huge and massivley important sporting iceberg.

Should we have closer monitoring of how funds are allocated and used, perhaps but that would just be another expensive lot of beauraucrats getting their noses in the trough. Should we continueas things are with wastefullness from inept practitioners in the systems of sport and Arts. Not a good thing but the alternative of letting the market decide would for many reasons I think end up in a disasterous deterioration of social values.

Dance, figurative art, fashion, music, film and theatre all provide outlets for people and jobs for many. If the funding went these people might find other more "productive" jobs but what about our soul as a nation?

Imagine young boys without a park where they could use their hoodies for goalposts

Imagine how that would change pour nation for the worse. Well it would be like that, only for people who have a congenital need to show off a lot.

Id like to say your ideas are a none-starter and I hope they are but everytime someone floats this idea I think one day its going to be like the Bob Marley lyric.

"Every day the bucket goes to the well,
one day the bottoms going to drop out."

Some politician is going to sense the mood is right for a grandstanding call for belt tightening and its the arts that will get even less money. They are having the funding stripped back as it is as more and morelottery money is poured into the Olympics blackhole.

You say "change" SWL, but how is that substantially different from disappear? Some things, by definition would, have to disappear (be replaced) - unless you're suggesting that there will be an *increase* in the arts w/o public funding?

Maybe I'm over simplifying, but this is what I'm getting from this conversation.

Poster A: Hey guys, why does all the money that goes to the arts end up supporting stuff nobody watches. What if we stopped giving them free money so they'd have to do something that engages the public. Thus making their own money /and/ getting a wider cross section of society involved in what some see as "high culture".

Poster B: Argh! Post-apocalyptic cultural nightmares! You want children to have their footballs taken away! We need to pay for something nobody enjoys because of the soul of the nation! Yes, that construct of society, the nation, has a single spiritual presence which can only be sustained by 3 art students watching a man swing a hoover around shouting "Blem! The eyes have fallen!" in a dingy hall paid for by taxpayers!

Yeah. Maybe I am oversimplifying things. Or maybe disagreeing with Blicky is "what i do [sic]"

"Poster B: Argh! Post-apocalyptic cultural nightmares! You want children to have their footballs taken away! We need to pay for something nobody enjoys because of the soul of the nation! Yes, that construct of society, the nation, has a single spiritual presence which can only be sustained by 3 art students watching a man swing a hoover around shouting "Blem! The eyes have fallen!" in a dingy hall paid for by taxpayers!

Yeah. Maybe I am oversimplifying things. Or maybe disagreeing with Blicky is "what i do [sic]"

Ahh you have worked out what I do, well I told you actually but you know its a start all the same

Now if you could only understand *why*, you'd be another step closer to enlightnenment

Its not the watching of the hoover swining that counts, pay attention, its the swinging of the hoower tha counts. Evne if there is no one around to see some bloke plaster a rock in different coloured leaves at six months intervals he still gets to walk in the countryside finding the leaves.

The soul of a nation is a feeling that has to be nurtured you dont and who knows where you might end up. Even someone as fantastically clever as I am cant second guess that. In this situation you slowly make changes and proceed with caution tweeaking and monitoring the results.[insert you own joke here]

"Fools rush in"

When did public funding of the arts begin?

Did the arts exist before public funding?

When did the greatest exponents of the arts ply their trade - before or after public funding?

Who the hell thinks sport is art?

You could extend SWL's argument to science actually. Most scientific products are papers read by a handful of people, and yet they each get given a decent wage and travel expenses to produce them. Why should we fund that? You could say, if they weren't given that (mostly government) money, they'd have to do something useful in order to get paid. They'd have to justify their work. I'm not using this as an attempt at a refutation of your point SWL, but I am curious if you think the same thing applies here? I know many people that do, but personally, I think they're horribly wrong. The consequence for science would be terrible: there would be less fundamental research, we'd miss out on key ideas that revolutionise scientific progress, and perhaps most importantly of all, we'd lose out on the spirit of free inquiry that created all this knowledge in the first place.

I think something similar is true of the arts. There would be more commercial artwork. I'm thinking about all the very talented artistic people who work for advertising agencies. They do very well at innovating given the constraints on them, but just think what they could achieve if they were able to work on ideas that really excited them. Like in the case of science, we might easily miss out on some rare geniuses. And, as above, perhaps most importantly of all, we'd be in danger of losing the spirit of artistic expression.

That said, one could certainly argue about the way that funding is allocated. Quite possibly too much goes to the opera, and I could believe that there are systematic biases in favour of the interests of elites (either cultural, wealthy or corporate). But quibbling about the total amount? In 2007, the budget for the UK was £587 billion, of which £104 billion on health - is £400 million so much to spend?

But science gives tangible results that you can touch, feel, hold and which quantifiably benefits mankind.

Without science, there is no technology. Without technlogy, we're back living in mud huts.

Can the same be said of the arts? Can a man live a full, productive life without having seen Michaelangelo's David?

When did public funding of the arts begin?
at least as far back as the Babylonians

Did the arts exist before public funding?
Yes. Cave paintings, etc.

When did the greatest exponents of the arts ply their trade - before or after public funding?
There's not much record of "art exponents" during the neolithic period.

Who the hell thinks sport is art?
Boxing like a ballet except no jumping and the dancers hit each other.

Art doesn't give "tangible results that you can touch, feel, hold and which quantifiably [benefit] mankind."? At least a significant portion of mankind?

When was the last time you appreciated an MRI machine because of it's touch, or your ability to hold it? What about the theory of General Relativity or quantum mechanics do you routinely get a firm, physical grip of?



Can the same be said of the arts?
Yes.

Can a man live a full, productive life without having seen Michaelangelo's David?
Nope.

What's the quantifiable benefit of a sculpture?
What's the quantifiable benefit of an MRI machine?
Are you saying that the theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics give no quantifiable benefits?

When did public funding of the arts begin?

Probably before we had money but that's a guess based on my understanding of anthropology, do you know the answer?



"Did the arts exist before public funding?

What kind of muppet question is that

I'll answer it anyway.

Public funding exisisted first they got a huge bunch of money togetehr and said "What can we do with this"?
and someone said who hadnt done much of the collecting or earning of the money said "Give it away to people who do nothing to deserve it!"

So they hired some consultants to find them people to give the money to. The first one did a stupid little dance and the people with all the money said "Your dance is rubbish but if we dont give the money to someone they will take it all away from us, so you have it and use it to make you daning less rubbish. Can we come to your opening night party?"
"Sure"




"When did the greatest exponents of the arts ply their trade - before or after public funding?


Well if you consider that by dint of the nobility and Church sponging off the poor masses in an essentially fuedal theorcarcy system, counts as public funding then the Rennaisance was pretty much publicly funded.

Wel the greatest mime measured by the bottom line is probably Rowan Atkinson. I cant hink of any more famous and well loved folk/singer/story telling/comedian type minstrels than Billy Connoly and although he did a lot of work on a commercial circuit his big break like Atkinsons was on the commercially funded BBC.

You may as well try the argument that because the best doctors work in private practice that we shouldnt have the publicly NHS. When its a fact that nearly all the doctors in private practice have at sometime benefitted from public funding during their studies.


"Who the hell thinks sport is art?

Lots of people think sport is art and there is a lot of mileage in that argument, but if you dont agree that sport is are explain rhythmic gymnastics to me and high diving and three day eventing and ice dancing and Zinedine Zidane and competition ballroom daning

Science as a whole does, but individual scientific papers, almost all of the time, do not.

"Without science, there is no technology. Without technlogy, we're back living in mud huts."

It might be said that without culture, we may as well just be living in mud huts. What would we have to do? Work and (ahem) reproduce, I guess. (OK, so not all bad.)

"Can the same be said of the arts? Can a man live a full, productive life without having seen Michaelangelo's David?"

You must compare like with like, obviously one sculpture can't compete with the whole of science and technology. But: can a man live a full, productive life without an iPod? Incidentally, the fact that you can 'store more than one song on your iPod' was one of the reasons given in the BBC article for how amazing was the work of this year's winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7035247.stm

Comparing like with like, the equivalent to "Without technology, we're back living in mud huts" would be something like "Without books, painting, stories, songs, ...".

"Are you saying that the theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics give no quantifiable benefits?"

Well, the only application I know of GR is GPS devices. Personally, I'm not that bothered about Michaelangelo, but I'd take Picasso over the GPS, even though I'm hopeless with directions and it would mean struggling with the paper maps.

More importantly - why the obsession with quantifiable benefits? Some benefits aren't quantifiable. Incidentally - it's very New Labour of you to be so interested in what's quantifiable! You should be reading Michael Oakeshott:

http://www.conservativeforum.org/EssaysForm.asp?ID=6102

How the hell did we get from Shakespeare to GPS?

Let's wind it back.

Someone said that public funding of the arts encourages creativity. I would argue that commercial pressures encourage creativity.

example - every band is looking for the next "new sound". The successful artistes are those that stand the test of time through experimentation - David Bowie, Madonna, the Beatles. They are able to do this with the fruits of commercial success, not public funding. In pursuit of dosh, they are forced to experiment. Had Bowie been hired as some kind of state musician, where would have been the impetus to experiment?


Withdraw public funding from the arts and the drivel will go, leaving the quality. Quality is always popular. Would Tracy Emmett be an artist of note without public funding?

Some might say that this would lead to populist, commercially driven art. Well "duh". And what's wrong with that? Salieri was the publicly funded composer whilst Mozart was the populist. The Sistine Chapel was painted for the gratification and self-aggrandisement of the church and Michelangelo was hired as a commercial venture. The Vatican were not sponsoring the arts. And this is so for the entire renaissance. It was a commercial venture.

The best art forms are by their nature, commercially viable. State funding merely sustains the uncommercial and thus the unpopular and unworthy.

Mmmm interesting thread.

I think it was the Nazi Hermann Goering who said, "Whenever I hear the word, culture, I reach for my revolver."



The Nazis certainly understood that art and culture were not useful things for the masses to have in their lives.

Crikey it might actually make them question and think about the status quo. Can't have that can we?