RIGHT across the developed world mountains of taxpayers' wonga are being urinated away on so-called cultural events.
It is possible that slightly less public money than originally planned will be squandered on bad art and live performance in Liverpool now that the Culture Company artistic director Robyn Archer has slung her hook back to Australia.
Still, I wouldn't bank on anyone getting value for money out of the over-hyped Liverpool Capital of Culture 2008 and the suits who are running it.
There is something soul-dead about publicly funded arts and culture anyway.
The last time I saw any such stuff was at FACT in Liverpool. It was a video art installation showing Japanese people wandering around a beach playing miserable tunes on trombones.
What rubbish! What a waste of money! And yet young men with goatee beards and young women who looked like Thelma (the ugly one from Scooby Do) were lapping it up and having fake intellectual discussions about it.
Let me tell you, real culture rises from the street. You witness it nightly in pub music sessions across Merseyside.
You see it in poems from the heart, which countless thousands of people write regularly.
You see it in small unbidden acts of kindness that take place daily, even on the toughest streets in Liverpool.
You see culture in the jokes that people text to each other, and in the banter that is around everywhere.
You get culture from someone singing a sad country song at a pub karaoke.
You get culture in blogs ...
You don't get culture from a bunch of over-paid stuffed shirts sitting in swanky offices and banging on about logos and sponsorship deals.
You don't get culture by sending the likes of Robyn Archer jet-setting around the world on the look-out for unicycling, Brechtian, practitioners of Mongolian throat-warbling with a side-line line in socialist puppetry.
Ms Archer's already had £250,000 from the culture money pit since she took on the post of artistic director in 2004, and that doesn't include any golden handshake pay-out that might or might not be coming her way.
Years ago, real art was produced by genuine artists starving in garrets ... or by those who were sponsored by rich people to immortalise their loved ones in oil paintings ... or by those commissioned by the Church to give artistic homage to God. In all of those circumstances, great art flourished.
Nowadays, instead, loads of Phoney Art (let's call it Phart) is produced by mediocrities whose only skill is in filling grant application forms full of the required politically correct, socially inclusive, box-ticking bull****.
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Sam Alabaster wrote...
What you say is largely true, but we must also accept that a lot of bad art was created under the patronage of the church and rich fops. The state, and councils of the 'great and good' usually get art projects hopelessly wrong, mind,look at the Greenwich Dome. Above all,it is a mistake to involve Yoko Bloody Ono in any civic arts projects. That is a lesson that Liverpool still has to learn.
Posted by: Sam Alabaster | July 7, 2006 5:53 PM