I've been busy today here already, and don't have much more time for culture blogging, so I will merely note the existence of a Stephen Pollard rant against arts festivals.

Stephen Pollard is too grand a personage to sort out his linking system to the point where it is not an incomprehensible piece of shit. I suspect the blog-ignorant designer of this other piece of shit that is to say pseudo-bloggery which the blogosphere pays even less attention to than it does to Pollard despite it being on an interesting subject to be the progenitor of the Pollard mess. I have had what passes for Pollard's linking system explained to me once before to the point where I made it work properly, but decent linking systems don't have to be explained – they work automatically. There's a a date, or maybe the word "permalink", and that's where the link is. Left click. Copy. Easy. This must be costing Pollard a Niagara of blog traffic. Damn this. I had written most of this piece before I remembered that linking to Pollard is a hideous recipe for grief. Memo to self: Ignore Pollard.

This piece about Festivals was first published in the Times, which is also deeply link unfriendly, so that's no good. So I suggest you either follow the primitive link above to the top of the Pollard blog and then scroll down until you get to the July 30th piece with "Festivals" at the beginning of the title, or else save yourself the bother and just take my word for it from the following quite long quotes:

Kevin Costner might have become a hero to a generation for believing in Field of Dreams that “if you build it, they will come”, but he was using his own money. The lesson of lottery funding is “if the arts establishment decides to build it, they won’t come”. The Life Force Centre, built beside Bradford Cathedral at a cost £5 million, closed in 2001 after seven months. It was projected to attract 40,000 people a year; in its first week it had 62 paying visitors. The Centre for Visual Arts in Cardiff was forecast to have 220,000 visitors in its first year. It managed 47,500 and closed in November 2001, after costing £9 million to build. The £15-million National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield closed after 16 months in 2000. It was supposed to attract 400,000 people a year. Fewer than 90,000 went through its doors.

The annual summer festival season highlights the perversion of the original idea of festivals. The first recorded “festival” was the Workington Festival in Cumberland in 1869, which comprised a band and a choir. During the First World War, evacuees who were at school for only half a day were offered lessons in dance, poetry, painting and music in their spare time, and festivals were created for them to show off their new skills. Today, almost all trace of that genuine community purpose has disappeared and they are merely a further example of the arts establishment spending other people’s money on its own minority tastes.

The trouble with the Pollard approach is that, being so concentrated on all the various enterprises he opposes and wishes the ground to swallow up, it is too easily dismissable as being anti-art.

I note in particular that many of the enterprises Pollard complains about seem to have Asian names, so critics will probably insinuate, and possibly say outright, that the man is a racist.

So let me try to make that same point somewhat differently, that lots of Asian artistic activity, and "diverse" artsism generally, is state funded: I'm in favour of diversity in art, including and especially ethnic and cultural diversity, and that's why I want the state to stop funding it. Arts subsidies are bad for art.

On the other hand, and to make the point that he personally does like art, Pollard cunningly ends his piece – you can tell about the order in which the relevant reading and writing was done here, can't you? – thus:

I’m one of that guilty minority who has his pleasure paid for by other people. So yes, I benefit from all this largesse. But every time I set foot inside one of these institutions, with their self-perpetuating bureaucracies, their now mandatory “outreach” programmes (obfuscatory attempts to show how “relevant” they are), and their oh-so-desperate attempts to be “accessible” (a bizarre aim, since the only people who want access to a minority pursuit are the minority who want access to it), I know that I am taking part in a giant scam, in which a cultural elite extorts money from the rest of society so it can better indulge itself.

It’s time the rest of you pulled the rug from underneath my feet.

That would be a diversely designed rug of hideously pseudo-Asian design cunning enough to fool the bureaucrats involved but not at all cunning from an artistic point of view, made possible by a grant from the Rug Diversity Council, and a source of loathing to all the best Asian rug designers, who make a perfectly decent living by being funded by their customers.

That's enough for today. Calm down Brian. Take a few deep breaths and pick up the threads of what passes for your life.