Wonderfully useless
Sir: Michael Simmons overlooks some scandalous examples of frivolous funding right under his nose (‘Waste land’, 15 February). A few minutes from our offices, there are several vast buildings, all lavishly subsidised by the taxpayer, whose sole purpose is to allow hordes of strangers to stare at rectangular sheets of fabric on which are daubed various colours and shapes – most of which quite wastefully replicate things that we can already see with our own eyes in the real world. Across the river, many millions more are spent on small armies of people coming together to bang, scrape and blow bits of wood, metal and brass for hours on end so that other people can sit and listen to them for no other reason than – brace yourselves, Spaffers – to enjoy themselves.
The arts are, by definition, frivolous. That is their gift: they carve out a space for us in which the demand for utility – which weighs down on so much of the rest of our lives – is suspended. Beethoven’s late string quartets, the paintings of Manet, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky – all quite useless! And yet it is this very quality, their total, majestic uselessness, that makes great art so unassailably useful. The Arts Council-funded projects that Simmons lists in his piece are indeed risible. But they’re risible not because they are frivolous, but because they are not frivolous enough. The reason why we’re in a place where plays ‘about Brexit’ and festivals ‘about sustainability’ are being funded by the Arts Council is precisely because of articles that demand that art becomes ‘less frivolous’, more ‘relevant’, more ‘useful’.
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