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Counting the true cost of the arts cuts is the headline on a Guardian article by Mark Brown. It starts (emphasis added):
A very good thing, the Lost Arts website, was launched on Thursday in Westminster with the aim of of recording all the organisations, initiatives, projects, commissions, tours and more that will be lost due to cuts in public spending on the arts.
It will also keep a running total of money lost to the arts and the money lost to the Treasury as a consequence.
The initiative is a collaboration between eight unions: the Musicians’ Union (MU), Equity, The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, the NUJ, Bectu, Unite, Prospect and PCS.
If you follow the link you get to Lost Arts. The front page currently says:
Money lost to the arts since 30.03.2011: £20,392,023.
Money lost to the economy since 30.03.2011: £40,784,046.
Emphasis added, again. The latter figure is exactly twice the former. I suppose this is a reference to the claim made by John Smith, President of the FEU, in the comments that “Every £1 invested in the Arts generates £2 for the wider economy”.
£2 out for every £1 in is really very modest as such claims go.
In the post below, Jonathan quotes Theodore Dalrymple saying the following rather mind-boggling statement.
“[Journalists are taxed at lower rates than normal people] … this is a considerable privilege, definitely worth preserving. It creates an identity of interest between the elite and the journalists, who are inhibited from revealing too much about anyone with powerful protectors.”
He thinks this is a good thing? Seriously? Journalists have an incentive to cover up the wrongdoings of the powerful, and this is good?
Leaving aside the obvious corollary of this, that France effectively licenses journalists, I personally do not think that politicians and bureaucrats should have any right to privacy whatsoever. They choose to go into politics, and they are trusted with our money and are given considerable power over us. In return, everything they do up to and including going to the toilet should be subject to scrutiny. They should have some protection against being libelled (but even then a relatively weak right – the burden of proof should be on the politician and it should be necessary to prove both untruth and malice). In truth I am not that keen on extending much of a right to privacy to anyone else either. As long as you are telling the truth, you should generally be able to say it out loud, in any forum. This is one case where the Americans have it right with the First Amendment.
As for the vulgarisation of culture, London is the most culturally vibrant city in Europe. Culturally speaking, Paris today is about as interesting as English food circa 1955. At least, Paris inside the peripherique is. There are some interesting things going on in rap music, language and art in some of Paris’ suburbs, but I doubt that Dalrymple is much of a fan. The price of cultural interestingness may be some vulgarity, but who gets to decide what is vulgar and what is art? Old men decrying the tastes of yoof today, I guess. The Nazis were very keen on doing this, too. As are the Chinese communists.
China is a deeply authoritarian place. As a consequence of that, the country is culturally pretty dead. The Chinese watch imported movies, and encourage their children to learn to play western classical music. What is produced domestically and gets wide distribution is frighteningly bland, which is what happens under authoritarian regimes. Interesting things can be going on underneath, which can sometimes lead to cultural explosions when the authoritarian regimes are gone (see Spanish and South Korean post-dictatorship cinema, for instance), but China is a way from that.
Who do you compare China with, though? There is one obvious rival.
In late April, a couple of days after some unspeakable barbarians had exploded a bomb in a restaurant in Marrakesh, I was sitting in a cafe in Fez, in a more northern part of Morocco. As in many cafes worldwide, there was a television in the room. This was showing a soap opera of some kind on a pan-Arabic TV channel. (There are many, many, many pan-Arabic TV channels. They are run out of Qatar and Dubai. Moroccan roofs have more satellite dishes on them than I have seen anywhere else on earth). This particular pan-Arab channel was showing a soap opera or a popular movie of some kind.
In any event, the program in question contained some Islamic symbols. There were mosques in the background of a few scenes. The TV was showing subtitles in Arabic. I am not sure if that was because the program was originally in some other language or if these were just closed captions in the same language as the original material, turned on because there was a lot of background noise. (It may have been that the program was in fact Pakistani, and the original language was Urdu, but I am not sure). In any event, though, the program contained musical dance numbers of a form that were familiar to me. And there were slightly more bare female midriffs than one expects on TV in an Arab country. I expect there were more than one sees on domestic Moroccan TV, too, which partially explains the satellite dishes. Morocco is authoritarian enough to censor its own TV, but not authoritarian enough to attempt to ban the dishes.
The program was not made in India, but the grammar of the program was entirely that of Bollywood. In North-West Africa, in the Arab world, one of the leading cultural influences is clearly India. This is hardly surprising. Go to Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Qatar and who does the actual work? People from South Asia; Indians and Pakistanis and Sri Lankans. Even when they are making programs for Arab markets, they use their own cultural reference points. Even when making programs for their own market, Pakistanis use Indian cultural reference points. However it happens, and however second or third hand it comes, the cultural influence of Bombay on the Middle East and North Africa is clearly immense
And is Bollywood vulgar? Oh Lord yes. More conservative Indians elsewhere in the country denounce its amoral wickedness as much as anyone in America has ever denounced Hollywood. The entertainment industries of India are run by gangsters at least as depraved as any who have ever run Hollywood or Las Vegas. It isn’t any great coincidence that the most savage terrorist attack carried out by Islamic extremists in recent years was on the city of Bombay. This is the heart of wickedness and vulgarity, and they know where the enemy is. Indian culture is vibrant and vulgar. On the surface and in the mass market at least, Chinese culture is dead. And Indian culture is the country’s greatest weapon against its enemies.
“A cleaner (janitor) at a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emanual Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm gallery on Wednesday morning.”
I still treasure that story, which appeared in this item about the art world (thanks to Tim Sandefur for the pointer. He is on a bit of a roll at the moment).
In thinking of art and tracing out the trends, good and possibly not so good, you can do a lot worse than read this book by Ernst Gombrich.
The film Alexander is playing on my TV at the moment – the Oliver Stone version – and despite some of the sillier aspects, the battle scenes are pretty good. Question: why do so many Hollywood films seem to insist that many of the actors talk with a sort of suppressed Irish accent? We have Alexander talking like Dave Allen. WTF? And of course recently there was Russell Crowe talking in the same manner in the Robin Hood film.
I am not complaining too hard, though. For as has been noted, Russell Crowe had to deliver a speech that was pure “Tea Party”.
Philip Goff is the founder of Art Uncut, an organisation which, in conjunction with UK Uncut, stages nights of music, comedy and short talks in opposition to government spending cuts. Mr Goff is a research fellow with the Phenomenal Qualities project at the University of Hertfordshire.
I think you should give his argument the consideration it deserves.
Here it is.
Art Uncut is founded on this principle, a belief about the kind of societal model that we believe to be better: a society with well-funded arts, well-funded public services, and where there is a certain amount of redistribution so that the gap between rich and poor does not get too wide. We began as a small group of artists and musicians involved in UK Uncut actions, but hope now to open up the anti-cuts movement to a broader audience: to those who are not temperamentally inclined to protest, or perhaps haven’t made their minds up yet. If we are serious about building a broad, sustained coalition of opposition with the potential for political influence, we need to reach out.
A week before the March for the Alternative on 26 March, Art Uncut staged a sell-out creative preliminary for the march: a night of music, comedy and short talks, headlined by UK Uncut, Josie Long and The Agitator. On the day, Art Uncut and UK Uncut jointly occupied BHS on Oxford Street, turning it into an artistic space with musicians, half a dozen poets and a performance from the actors Sam and Timothy West.
To entice you further, there is hostile mention of Robert Nozick in the main article and, in the comments, an artistic creation of genius, Clarence the Anti-Cuts Octopus.
Yes Lawrence of Arabia is showing on Channel Five, now. I’ve been only half or less paying attention, but I heard this loud and clear:
“Money. It’ll have to be sovereigns. They don’t like paper.”
Said by Lawrence to Allenby, on how to pay the Arabs to fight against the Turks.
He would agree, as would all our mutual friends here.
This is a point of view which is now spreading rather fast.
My Cobden Centre Radio colleague-stroke-boss Andy Duncan is enthusiastic about the latest Keynes v Hayek video. Guido Fawkes already has it up at his blog, and that’s where I’m now watching it.
My first reaction is that Keynes was the bald one, while Hayek had plenty of hair right to the end. This video has it the other way around.
Lots-of-head-hair-to-no-head-hair is one of the most important variables in political propaganda, the bald guy typically being the wicked loser, and the one with the good head of hair typically being the virtuous winner. I therefore deeply regret this particular reversal of the truth. If Keynes had really had lots of head hair, but Hayek very little, fair enough. Hayek would still have been right and Keynes would still have been wrong. But why miss a trick like this, when the truth is on our side?
Otherwise, this video seems pretty good. The important thing is that Austrianism, approximately speaking, must now lose the economic argument and be known by everyone, everywhere, to be losing the economic argument. Austrianism is now being shunned by everyone of any significance in policy-making circles. Right thinking people all now agree that Austrianism is delusional.
And right thinking people are now driving the world economy over the cliff.
For a little more chapter and verse, try reading Detlev Schlichter‘s latest.
When the world economy lies strewn about the landscape at the bottom of the cliff, Austrianism turns around and wins. It reassembles the world economy, and then, slowly at first, but later with gathering strength, drives it back to its former heights and beyond, way beyond.
Well, I like to live in hope.
Ayn Rand’s classic novel, Atlas Shrugged, which was published in 1957 and has sold vast copies, is released in a film version – or at least in a first instalment – this coming Friday in selected cinemas across the United States. I hope we can see it here in the UK. Interestingly enough, parts of the media are picking up on this. Here is an interview with an investment manager who is inspired by Rand’s “radicals for capitalism” philosophy and worldview. I am definitely going to make a point of seeing this film, whether it comes out at a UK cinema, or via DVD.
The reaction to the Financial Panic of 2008, with its massive bailouts, calls for “unregulated capitalism” (!) to be regulated, banker-bashing, etc, has certainly given Rand’s novel new resonance. I often heard it said that her villains are more convincing than her heroes, although Hank Rearden has always struck me as a well-drawn character. As for the likes of Barack Obama, Rand would have recognised what he stands for, instantly.
Well, well. This will get some luvvies in a tizz: I knew a bit about the life and times of the great, late Liz Taylor, much-married Hollywood actress and drop-dead gorgeous to boot (those violet eyes, ye gods). But I was not aware that she was such a keen supporter of Israel. . She was definitely not of the “Michael Moore school” of Hollywood.
Somewhere up there, she’s having a glass of bubbly with Richard Burton. RIP.
I am not going to tell you much about it: only that it is one of the best SF movies I have seen in a long while and perhaps the best combat movie I have ever seen. The soldiers acted like soldiers. They were competently led by people who were very human and proud to be US Marines.
Go see it, and then tell all your friends about it.
Fugitive Inklings is what the blog Fugitive Ink has turned into, and just over a week ago, it featured a delightful posting about a visit, by Madam Fugitive Inklings and her young son, to the Globe Theatre. This is one of London’s most successfully idiosyncratic recent architectural additions, being a recreation, as authentically as they could make it, of the original Globe Theatre, pretty much where it originally was, where many of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed.
Mother and son attended, not a play, but a stage fighting demonstration, done with the exact sort of weapons that would first have been used in these plays. Better yet, they got to hear about it from the man who contrived these weapons. This is one of those posting where you start out trying to pick a particularly good bit, but end up wanting to copy the whole thing. So, instead of copying and pasting any of it, I say: go there and read the whole thing.
Not long ago, I read a book called 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which starts off with the tale of how they moved the original manifestation of the Globe Theatre from its previous home in north London, across the river to the South Bank, i.e. to where the Globe is now. And I think it was also in this book where I read that a great many of the people in the first audiences for Shakespeare’s plays were soldiers, camped outside the city limits of what London then consisted of, waiting to go off to fight on the continent. Such audiences would have paid particular attention to fights, and to the weapons used in them. And of course they would have understood perfectly all the verbal references to weaponry that occur in the plays, many of which now baffle most of us.
Here is a good piece by Rob Fisher about the latest episode of Channel 4 TV’s 10 O’clock Live. Particularly good bit:
Another highlight was the interview with Stephen Dubner, a co-author of SuperFreakonomics. The interviewers Jimmy Carr and Lauren Laverne failed to say anything remotely intelligent, but it thankfully didn’t matter too much because they did at least let Dubner speak at length. He made some good (and downright subversive) points about the incentives of politicians. He suggested that they sign up for long term projects such as “improve education” and they get paid at the end of 5 or 10 years proportional to the results. The idea is to align success in politics with success at achieving goals, and he compared this to how businesses succeed and fail. Getting this kind of thinking into the mainstream – not necessarily agreeing with the specifics but just getting people to think about economics and game theory and how politics really works – is great stuff. Well done Dubner and Channel 4.
I agree with Rob. My preferred attitude to spreading ideas has always been to unbundle them, to try to spread them, at any rate in hostile circumstances, one at a time or at least only a very few at a time. Bundling among friends is also, if you think about it, often saying just the one thing or just the few things, that the bundling of this with that and maybe also with that makes sense – this, that and that having already been long agreed about separately.
I haven’t watched 10 O’clock Live beyond episode one, but applaud Rob for doing so. We need our people everywhere, and watching (between us) everything.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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