![]() In this context, the major justification for government arts funding became its contribution both to that trade and to trade in general, a case based on the mounting evidence of the economic value of the arts to the so-called leisure industries, and thereby to the regeneration of Britain's post-industrial cities. Popular in form and patrician in content, the heritage industry was cultural Thatcherism, promoting (as the then secretary of state for national heritage, Virginia Bottomley, put it in May 1996) "our country, our cultural heritage and our tourist trade". This was seen most clearly in the cluster of forms that defined the cultural 80s. During the 80s, in the arts as in so many other spheres of life, Margaret Thatcher sought to shift power from the producer to the consumer, using the market to disempower the provocative (from political theatre groups to the high avant garde) in favour of the populist. What both the patrician and the provocative shared was a primary concern for the people making the art. ![]() Margaret Thatcher sought to shift power from the producer to the consumer. In the theatre in the late 1950s, on the BBC in the early to mid 1960s, and pretty much everywhere from 1968, patrician arts institutions were challenged and in many cases transformed by those who believed the arts weren't there to elevate or divert, but to provoke. Over the following 30 years, this view of the value of the arts came under attack, not from the market place but from artists who were artistically and often politically oppositional. In this the council was seeking to reverse a rising tide of populism (art's role as entertainment, its realm the marketplace, its form the business, its audience mass), a goal summed up in the founding chairman John Maynard Keynes's ringing declaration: "Death to Hollywood." Behind the latter policy lay a theory of artistic value that you could call patrician: art's purpose as ennobling, its realm the nation, its organisational form the institution, its repertoire the established canon and works aspiring to join it. When it was founded in 1946, the Arts Council could justify its activities in its own terms: it was there to widen access to the arts throughout the country, as well as to maintain and develop national arts institutions in the capital. In the zero-sum economy of austerity Britain, the arts are increasingly required to couch their case in terms appropriate to those basic services – social care, education, policing – with which they're in competition for dwindling public funds. Ivan Lewis, Labour's former culture spokesman, acknowledges that the case for the arts is yet to be won even within his party and the new arts spokesman, Dan Jarvis, sees quantifying the value of the arts as one of his most urgent priorities. ![]() Despite the culture minister Ed Vaizey's insistence that the 30% cut in the Arts Council's budget is a temporary expedient, many of his Conservative colleagues consider any public funding of the arts a form of grand larceny. ![]() ![]() 3. THE WPA SPENT MONEY ON THE ARTS. FREEOver 60 years after the foundation of the Arts Council, 50 years after the creation of the RSC, with publicly funded British plays the toast of Broadway, visits to newly free museums doubling in a decade and British concert life the envy of the world, surely we don't have to justify giving public money to the arts? Again? ![]()
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