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Dame Lynda Topp’s diatribe against the government’s cuts to the arts budget raises some interesting questions about how the arts should be funded.
I’m sure most Oilers would agree that, as a general principle, the arts should fund themselves. If no one wants to read your poem, listen to your song or hang your picture on the wall, that’s probably because it isn’t very good. You should learn to do better or go away and do something else. Standards in the arts will not be improved by the government’s subsidising amateurism and mediocrity.
Another argument against state funding is that the state is not supernaturally endowed with outstanding good taste and the bureaucracy it supports has been captured by the woke elite, so state grants to aspiring artists will tend to prioritise woke idealism over artistic merit.
That said, there are some good ways that the government can support the arts, for instance by commissioning artworks for civic purposes. The ruling class can patronise the arts from their private resources, as they often do. The very defence budget that so aggrieves Lynda Topp supports three top-class professional brass bands.
How were the arts funded in history? Until at least the 18th century, mostly by wealthy patrons. Composers, for instance, sought employment in the households of royalty and the upper Roman Catholic hierarchy. This is a reason why most of the great composers were Roman Catholics, and it also underscores the fact that music is an expensive business that takes deep pockets to bankroll. Mozart was the first real exception to this: too temperamental, apparently, to tolerate conditions of employment, he eventually became the first freelance composer, living a life of constant financial anxiety until he died, arguably of exhaustion and overwork, at the age of 35.
Not that he didn’t try to get a job. After quitting the ones he had, he traipsed around Europe working his contacts to try to get a lucrative appointment, but without success. Apparently, being the greatest musical genius in history was not sufficient compensation for an eccentric personality and erratic habits.
I’m not saying anything new by pointing out that music is expensive and musicians are temperamental. What it comes down to, I think, is that if you are serious about music, then you have to be prepared to be poor and accept the low probability that you might be one of the very few who somehow fall on their feet and get rich. You shouldn’t expect to be supported out of the public purse when you haven’t proven yourself to the public.
There is one other way that music is supported, of course, and that is through corporate sponsorship. Now sponsors like to get something back for what they’re putting in and they’re not going to sponsor you unless you’ve already shown that you have something. So that is an incentive (apart from the pressing incentives of hunger and cold) for musicians to strive for excellence. And so they should. No one should be forced to subsidise mediocrity.
