I've finally cleared out my email backlog and found I'd emailed to myself a couple of arts-themed news stories. This is a short piece patching them together. How much should society fund the arts? I'm not sure of the answer and wondering what readers make of it.
On one hand, public taste, left to its own devices, seems to go to simple, unchallenging and, well, pretty basic, at least the way John Moore tells it. Faced with that, it's hard not to be appealed to by the Arts Party's urging that more public money could be given to the arts without a significant budgetary impact: after all, more arts ideas should lead to more interesting ideas. As well as the desire for ideas, there's an "eat your greens" benefits to arts events that the State of Mississippi is aware of and finds beneficial. Despite all of this, It's hard not to be repulsed on the other hand by the implied snobbishness as to public taste of Margaret Pomeranz -
Would you really rather go see the latest Hollywood offering with its minimal challenges, just because it offers you everything you would expect, allowing you to go home feeling vaguely satisfied for a nanosecond but never requiring you to think again about what you have just seen? Sure, Felony and Predestination are challenging and thought-provoking films, but for goodness sake, they are also nourishing in a way that Spiderman, whatever its number or incarnation, could never hope to be.
What do you think? How much ought the community spend funding arts and culture?
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