Those subsidies from government often aren’t worth it

Sure and it’s lovely if someone walks in with a freebie cheque for you. But cheques very rarely stay freebie - there will be an insistence upon imposing some costs in return, obviously enough:

The news that Wigmore Hall in London is to turn its back on an annual subsidy of £345,000 from Arts Council England (ACE), after a successful campaign to raise £10m from individuals and the private sector, is almost as beautiful to my ears as the last thing I heard there, which was the Dunedin Consort playing Henry Purcell.

Its director, John Gilhooly, is surely right to free his institution from the Let’s Create strategy, which informs all ACE’s funding decisions, linking subsidies to onerous outreach work rather than to excellence in performance.

Free money ain’t free money. So, always looks askance at those offering it. It can often be - and over time, with the accretion of the demands, almost always is - cheaper not to take that free cash.

But we can and should go further than this. The arts will be cheaper without the free money cheques from the government. More than that it’s possible to raise the necessary funding from those who are actually interested in the arts rather than those forced, at gunpoint, to pay for them. So that’s what we should do then.

If we stop the free cheques with their imposed insistences and instead leave people free to pay for what they desire then we can close down the whole Arts Council in one fell swoop. Which will indeed be lovely. Not just that we’ll no longer be taxing the chambermaid to provide chamber music, but that the entire system will be vastly cheaper too. For we’ll have done away with all those impertinent insistences and be left with just the costs of the actual arts themselves. Privately supported would not, after all, cough up for such. That private money would not pay for them is proof that they’re not worth doing after all.

As with the Arts Council itself of course.

Tim Worstall