Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph wrote about the arts being subsidised. He was against it, not surprisingly. Most people in the arts world are for it - not surprisingly! I am ambivalent about it. As Heffer says there is still the question that nags at you: why should the ordinary tax payer who is not in the least interested in, say, opera, have to cough up with hard earned money to suvbsidise people who are fairly well off who like going to Covent Garden operas?
What Heffer does not like, and here I can't help feeling he has a good point, is the government in the shape of Arts Councils having fingers on the purse strings.
I am reminded of what Kingsley Amis had to say about the subject in a letter to The Times in 1981:
"The way an artist is paid profoundly affects his product. To susidise him, to give him other people's money on request and unconditionally, disrupts the all important relationship between him and his audience. A composer under no pressure to attract ordinary concertgoers, in other words non-specialists, is evidently under a kind of pressure to attract specialists, critics, experts, even trendies, perhaps to be self-indulgent. Subsidy maintains or erects barriers between the composer and those who could be his public, with the result that most new works played at concerts have to be sandwiched between familiar works, otherwise nearly everyone either arrives late or leaves early."
This was followed by a letter from Lady Borham:
"Voltaire, Rousseau and even Shakespeare would have had a hard time surviving without patronage."
That's what artists should have - patrons not handouts.
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