Funding the Arts, Without the Box-Ticking

Alongside his position at home as England's most popular composer, Edward Elgar has in recent decades been critically re-evaluated, and is now rightly treated as being amongst the first rank internationally.

Yet, as the Telegraph reports today, the Arts Council is giving no money towards the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of his birth.

This is not so surprising. Central public funding of the arts is now firmly tied to social policy targets, and to the promotion of a politically-based social agenda. That, and of course a cultural disdain for any artist too easily identified with the nation's sense of itself.

However, it is no longer enough to simply turn to private corporate sources as an alternative.

Many companies are now just as eager to tick boxes in an attempt to appear 'progressive' as any government quango.

A good example of what happens as a result of this can be seen in the excellent new English Music Festival's struggle to keep going; organisers found that companies were reluctant to support an event which they considered did not chime adequately with their politically and socially 'relevant' image-building.

The answer lies in by-passing both of these sources, and cultivating instead a culture of individual giving not tied to the needs of box-ticking.

The New Culture Forum will return to this vital issue in the future.

Last Night's Culture Clash

Guests Andrew Haydon, Susan Shaw and the New Culture Forum's Marc Sidwell joined Peter Whittle to discuss the rise of a "vicarious emotionalism industry" surrounding the disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann.

Posted in Video add new comment

Edward Elgar: self-made giant of our culture

Simon Heffer in today's Telegraph:

The politics of the context in which Elgar wrote, insofar as they ever mattered, matter now not at all. He is a true landmark of our culture, a life-enhancer, but also, as all great men must be, a towering example.

Read the full article here.

The British Media's anti-Israel Bias

Once again a British television programme has taken the complex and tragic story of Israel and turned it into a polemic about the endlessly victimised Palestinians and those brutal, hate-filled, despicable Jews.

Carol Gould has written a review of Paddy Ashdown's Channel 4 documentary 'Battle for the Holy Land: Jerusalem’ for current viewpoint. "Israel is far from angelic," she writes, "but the distorted and deeply unjust image projected in the British media of this tiny but vibrant nation makes me sick to the core of my being."

What is so infuriating about the iniquitous way the history of the Jewish State is depicted in every media form in the United Kingdom is the lack of context and the constant mantra of the millions of hostile Arabs being entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.

Read the full article here.