Comment & Debate
Brian Micklethwaits. “Against arts subsidies”. Libertarian Alliance. – It as been said that noble families are those that made their money long enough ago for it to have been forgotten how. Similarly, all “serious” art forms of the type now kept alive by the Arts Council were once upon a time big business. Why did Haydn write over a hundred symphonies? Because music publishers paid him handsomely to write symphonies. Much fuss surrounds the (I trust) imminent demise of the Arts Council’s “Literature Panel”. Did the Golden Age of the English Novel need a Literature Panel? The big new art forms now are films, pop music, and more recently such things as pop videos and TV shows. These art forms needed no government grants to get started, even if governments have, for their own governmental reasons, chosen to pay for broadcasting in order to keep control of it.