One of the more important anniversaries in the arts world is taking place this year, but the object of commemoration is no composer, painter or playwright, but the Arts Council (these days the Arts Council of England, after Welsh and Scottish funding was devolved to separate bodies), which this year celebreates its 60th birthday.
A very gracious press officer for the organisation explains to me that the Council "has always been about innovation and change", and in keeping with this spirit is now engaged in a long range consultation about its future.
Rather in the manner of goverments unsure how to address a pressing public issue, ACE is keen to start "a national debate" about its work. After initial consultations and focus groupings last year, they've boiled the issues at stake down to five key questions:
• What do you value about the arts? • What principles should guide public funding of the arts today? • What are the responsibilities of publicly funded arts organisations? • When should an artist receive public money? • Should members of the public be involved in arts funding decisions?
And they want everybody's opinion: not just yours and mine as pathological arts fetishists, but those who probably wouldn't register these as interesting questions (the fabled "new audiences" of tomorrow). Quite whether this is going to set the nation's pubs and water coolers humming with strong views about public support for mime artistry, or fuel heated debates on radio phone-ins, is open to question.
But the question of arts subsidy is a tricky one, one that many of us who can afford more theatre tickets because of it would probably not want to dwell on.
Because arts subsidy exists precisely to protect those artforms that the public doesn't like very much, doesn't it? The reason the Royal Opera House and the National Theatre gobble up such vast sums of public money is that without such help they would wither away.
You could argue that we're shoring up our heritage by protecting such vulnerable cultural stores, and propose a kind of Reaganite "trickle-down" theory of cultural enrichment: Bowie and Bjork wouldn't sound half so interesting without Stockhausen, for instance, and there'd certainly be no Stockhausen without arts subsidy. But neither line is all that convincing.
So why is ACE so keen to find out what the broader public wants? It may be that this is a more or less cosmetic exercise, designed to make an inescapably elitist organisation appear "accountable". The press officer I spoke to was keen to stress that this was a "deliberative" exercise, that other "stakeholders" such as arts professionals will also be consulted, and that it's way too early to say exactly how much influence public opinion will be given.
But if it's not, shouldn't every contemporary classical composer, every performance artist, and the board at Covent Garden, be losing an awful lot of sleep?
