From a column by Bob and Roberta Smith in the Guardian, January 4
The cuts to the Arts Council and other funders of museums destroys and undersells British culture. How can the country that produced Shakespeare cut core funding of the study of English? What kind of conservative does not want people to study Elgar? How have we got to a state where our government is so ignorant that it is prepared to launch a war on British culture? Why are the chattering classes not up in arms about this devaluation of Dickens, Turner and Emin?
The arts are a universal language, reminding us that the factors that unite us are huge, wonderful and exciting, and that what divides us is small and mean. In the arts, Britain is still a superpower. The whole world flocks to visit the Tate, the National Theatre or the Sage. This government should realize what it has got and stop bashing culture. The current cuts to the arts and humanities spell out the end of the British people’s emancipation through culture. For me, it’s like ripping up the Magna Carta.
P.S. The author Googled “Emin” without success.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracey_Emin
You made it up!!!!!
How ironic. While next door, Ireland is reviving the Irish language, England is tearing out its own heritage by the roots.
However, when I Googled “Emin” the first thing to come up was a Wikipedia profile: a full description of Tracey Emin’s life and prolific work. Despite budget cuts she has not vanished yet. She was one of the “stars” of Tate Modern’s Pop Life: Art in a Material World, which I saw in London almost 2 years ago, and again in Ottawa at the National Gallery, last year.
I hate being shamed.
EK
…but putting her (implicitly) in the same league with Shakespeare, Elgar, Dickens and Turner is absurd (IMHO). (One hopes the author of this piece included her simply to be provocative.) Support for culture and the arts ought to mean support for good stuff, not pop trash. So we come back to the old questions: who decides? where are the lines to be drawn? Don’t get me started!
Curmudgeon,
Some of the pop trash artists of today will be the old masters of tomorrow.
I can remember thinking, in my youth, like my father, that only classical symphonic music was “real” music, and that abstract art wasn’t “real” art.
The theatrical equivalent might be to say that Shakespeare’s King Lear is “real” drama but Beckett’s Waiting for Godot isn’t. Clearly those narrow views of value in art don’t stand up. A superb Automatiste painting by Riopelle or Borduas can be as satisfying and as skilfully achieved as a Rubens. It’s true that the criteria and sensibility we need to bring with us in order to appreciate them are different, but that’s a good thing, I reckon. It would be stultifying if we were to attribute worth in aesthetic endeavours only to works which were ancient and/or approved by “the academy”. New waves, even slightly trashy new waves, open up the windows of perception and allow us to see our world with fresh and more democratic eyes.
The unqualified veneration, today, of the Magna Carta, otherwise than a remarkable historical constitutional document raises a suspicion that the veneraters have not read it. In many respects the values it reflects are incompatible with modern democratic ideas. Some of its provisions offend today’s sensibilities and have, in effect, been “torn up”. Nevertheless much of it is wonderful and deserve the veneration but unqualified veneration of it in its entirety is undeserved.
A.P. Herbert argued somewhere in his Uncommon Law books that the Magna Carta had been completely repealed over the centuries. That does not of course stop it from symbolizing something important about the rule of law applying to the Crown. It’s not a particularly effective image for protesting cuts to the arts that are being made, as has been pointed out, to many other areas of British life as well.
“How can the country that produced Shakespeare…”
Was he funded? And who said the Liberal-Conservative (not conservative) government was going to cut art galleries? People will still go to them. Arts Councils don’t produce art. Of course this was in the Guardian.
Lots of important benefits will be cut, education, health care, entertainment, etc. It’s awful, but that is the way it is, in the UK, Canada and the US. But it is inevitable. Some artists will survive (artistically) and many will not. But overspending over the years will cause greater catastrophies, and lots of people, especially the next generation will suffer. Show me how this can be avoided !!!!