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.
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.
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.
Rod Liddle in this week's Spectator:
[T]here are certain sorts of people whom the BBC thinks it’s all well and good to be fairly nasty to, and Scientologists are among them. Indeed, there are certain groups of people whom the BBC feels that its personnel must roundly abuse or even phy-sically chastise if it is going to give them airtime, such as, for example, the British National Party, or members of Islamic groups that are not on the ever-shifting list of politically OK Islamic groups. These people all come under category one in the BBC producer guidelines. In each case, the presenter is required to shout at these people because they are plainly, obviously, horrible — you will remember the Newsnight interview, for example, in which BNP leader, Nick Griffin, was denied the chance to answer a single question. And any BBC interview with a Muslim mullah who has hooks instead of hands.
The Scientologists do not quite fall into this special category; under those aforementioned guidelines, they come in category two — people towards whom the presenter should display contempt, quiet hostility and open dislike, but should not actually punch or scream at. Members of the Conservative party and Ukip, all Israelis other than those who are activists within ‘peace’ groups, evangelistic Christians, supporters of the Countryside Alliance, Roman Catholics, paedophiles and chairmen of multinational corporations are similarly covered by the category two requirements. Category three, meanwhile, demands that the presenter affect an attitude of studied indifference and mild disdain and applies to interviews with most members of the present government, unless they were against the war in Iraq, in which case they get the category four treatment, which is also handed out to pop stars who wish for the African debt burden to be written off, all disabled people, ‘ordinary’ members of ethnic minorities and especially ‘moderate’ Muslims, all charity spokeswomen and bearded scientists in spectacles who insist that the earth is going to turn into a cinder by the year 2012. Category four requires the presenter to fawn in a sickening manner and, on occasion, proffer sexual favours.
Read the full article here.
