Funding the Arts
Sir: May I commend your editorial (17 March) on the dangers inherent in state support for the Arts and endorse your recommendations that private individuals should be encouraged to patronise the arts through the use of tax incentives? Our aim should be to diversify rather than centralise the funding of the arts; in terms of public money this can probably best be done locally rather than regionally, but the main impulse should come from commercial (even trade union) sponsorship and of course from the private individual. Ultimately it is only through public response that the effectiveness of arts promotion can be gauged, but any agency which is insu lated from this by high levels of subsidy can easily become remote from its real patrons (as opposed to its bureaucratic paymasters). It is a nonsense that the Exchequer should collect VAT from the arts with one hand and hand out subsidy with the other. This discriminates against the increasingly debilitated commercial sector which is in fact forced to subsidise its already well-fed public counterpart. The abolition of VAT on the arts; the introduction of tax allowances for firms and individuals; and a reduction in personal taxation should be the cornerstones of the incoming Conservative Government's arts policy. Against such a background a re-assessment of the role and budget of the Arts Council might reasonably take place with a view to relieving Mr Shaw and his colleagues of some of their headaches.
R G Foulkes Warden, Department of Adult Education, University of Leicester.
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