What nobody seems to think worth mentioning is how corporate sponsorship changes the very meaning of these palaces of culture. The British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, in particular, are meant to stand for who we are as a people, as a democracy. They are the cathedrals of democracy.

He really does seem to have missed that art is elitist, doesn’t he?

What is your favourite smell?
New shoes.

Fair enough. Bit pandering to the female stereotype perhaps and requiring of a system that produces new shoes cheaply and efficiently so we can all have them. But still, fair enough.

What makes you unhappy?
Misogyny and capitalism.

Oh well, fortunately we look to actresses for ability at acting rather than logic or advice on our socio-economic system.

Art thrives.

So, when do we close the Arts Council?

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.

The government spending less money on luvvies is exactly like abolition of the right to trial by jury, eh?

€30 of steel scrap or €800,000 of artwork?

It is thought that one of the pieces the thieves were trying to offload for scrap was a steel sculpture by Basque artist Chillida titled “Topos IV”, valued at 800,000 euros (£675,000).

Detectives at the time said the robbery had the hallmarks of “an inside job” and were likely to have been stolen to order for a collector.

But the discovery of the intact collection in a lock-up in Getafe, close to the industrial estate from where they were stolen, and the attempts to sell the sculptures for scrap have led police to reconsider their initial theory.

“It now appears more likely that we are dealing with amateurs,” a police spokesman said.

Bloody right they were amateurs. Steel scrap is more like €300 a tonne these days…..

Tomorrow morning Somerset county council will decide whether it will cut 100% of its direct grants to the arts, amounting to roughly half its total cultural spend.

Mustn’t allow them to do that now, must we? You know, democratically elected politicians deliberating over how to spend the taxpayers’ money? No, of course not, that would be letting this accountability, localism, shit to get well out of hand.

The National Campaign for the Arts estimates that every £1 of grant given to the arts brings a fifteen-fold return in investment into the county – a £3.75m contribution. The creative industries in Somerset employ more than 8,000 people with an annual turnover greater than £345m. This economic argument would stand, even if the arts development budget wasn’t reported to be £159,000 – 0.0004% of the Council’s overall expenditure.

It’s also 0.05% of total turnover is the subsidy. The sort of amount that is simply a rounding error. I would be amazed if the recipients are not spending more than that on applying for the grants.

Over a seven-year period, the US market share of box-office takings in British cinemas was between 63% and 80%. The UK share, which was mainly for American co-productions, was between 15% and 30%; films from Europe and the rest of the world took only 2% to 3%. So for most people it’s almost impossible to have a choice of films; you get what you’re given.

That people actively choose not to watch arthouse films is evidence that people aren’t given the opportunity to watch arthouse films.

That people actively choose to eat pizza is evidence that tripe is not available, eh?

How can we change this? We could start by treating cinemas like we treat theatres. They could be owned, as they are in many cases, by the municipalities, and programmed by people who care about films – the London Film Festival, for example, is full of people who care about films.

In short, the places that show films should be run by the people who are more likely to show Ken Loach films and the viewing public be buggered.

It’s an amusing theory alright, but there’s really nothing new about some luvvie screaming “Look at MEEEEE!” is there?

No, really.

Then the beginning of para 9

This might explain the increasing desire of councils and art institutions to commission yarn bombers to create official works of art.

Yup, it all turns to shit.

I was once asked to look at a portfolio of pencil drawings by an ex-prisoner; they were trite, unaccomplished, cliched, clumsy and painful to look at. They were without a scintilla of merit. When I said so than man’s astonished representative said “But the prison art visitor said he has a rare talent”. “What was he in for?” I asked. “GBH”. “Well,” I suggested, “he would say that, wouldn’t he?”.

How excellent, a better road map for what we should be cutting.

You want it, you pay for it.

When Williams made this argument for what he called moral luck, it provoked huge controversy. Wasn’t an act either moral or immoral, regardless of the consequences?

Would Gauguin’s abandonment of his family have been justifiable if he’d drowned on the way to Tahiti? Or if he’d been simply a bad watercolourist? The argument is being made that because he produced great art as a result then it was OK.

Bit morally suspect really….the ends justify the means, no?

Would Lenin and Stalin’s massacres of tens of millions have been justified if communism had in fact arrived? Pol Pot’s of a third of the population if agrarian socialism had in fact turned out to be what made everyone happy?

You see the problem and I don’t see that there’s a let out because great art rather than the perfect society was created (although of course I do see the difference between abandoning a Danish wife in Denmark with her five children and rounding up millions into camps).

But we cannot simply turn around and insist that the end never justifies the means either. Millions died defeating Hitler and that’s generally regarded as morally just. (Generally, for there are those who insist that that end does not justify violence.)

Not sure there’s anywhere to go with this well known moral conundrum except to say that I’m deeply unconvinced that artists have any more of a get out clause than the rest of us.

Surprise, eh?

What a day job inevitably means, of course, is spending the majority of your waking hours not doing the thing you love:

Just like everyone else then, eh?

James Cameron, the director of the 3D blockbuster Avatar, has been accused of ripping off ideas from two popular Soviet Union science fiction writers.

Well, yes, there do seem to be similarities.

But then he’s also ripped off Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas and any number of other trite fables.

The Times disclosed in April that a sculpture bought by the Royal Festival Hall from the trust had been made by Colin Pitchfork, who was serving life for killing two teenage girls.

The centre withdrew the item, publicly apologised and said that it would “have a conversation with the Koestler Trust about future policy”.

Kath Eastwood, whose daughter Lynda Mann, 15, was killed by Pitchfork, said Cochrane’s painting should also be removed. She said: “Obviously the work of a man who has committed that crime — which is just as horrific — shouldn’t be on display. I know what the parents must be thinking.”

Dean Stalham, formerly an art specialist at the trust, said: “They should stop celebrating art by paedophiles and serious sex offenders, and care more for the thoughts and feelings of victims of crime.”

Art is art: it matters not who created it. If Hitler’s skills had been comparable to those of Rembrandt then his paintings would be as worth celebrating while his other actions would be just as condemnded as they are.

My Latin’s not up to it but it’s a variation of pecunia non olet. A pint of beer brewed by a child rapist is a pint of beer to be judged as a pint of beer. A painting by a child rapist is a painting to be judged as a painting.

We might, we should, we do, bang up a child rapist for being a child rapist but to then insist that every aspect of them, every thing they do or produce, is thus evil and to be anathematized is simply cretinous stupidity.

We’re special, the arts, so we deserve more tax money.

That’s pretty much it. No mention of the way in which the entire State arts budget is simply a subsidy from the non-metropolitan poor to the metropolitan upper middle classes, providing large amounts of indoor work with no heavy lifting to anyone who can package a grant proposal together.

My solution? Abolish the Arts Council altogether and have no public subsidy at all. If you want to watch a fat bird sing or a thin bird dance then come up with dosh yourself.

Mark Hudson.

Neither is John Veals, the odious hedge-fund manager created by Sebastian Faulks, who masterminds a cynical short-selling scheme that will make him millions but hasten the ruin of the Allied Royal Bank, a thinly disguised Royal Bank of Scotland.

OK, but could those artists try and find out about the crisis before they start writing? You know, get to grips with the idea that short selling is actually a good thing first?

THE artist Grayson Perry has woven the 21st-century answer to the Bayeux Tapestry.

Instead of the Norman invasion, the Walthamstow Tapestry, which is 49ft long, tells the story of modern Britain’s conquest by the ideology of consumerism.

…

Three copies of the Walthamstow Tapestry have been made — one will hang at the Victoria Miro gallery in Islington, north London, where this week’s exhibition will open. Another has been bought by a private client and the fate of the third is not yet known.

So, how much did it cost?