When we heard that a book entitled Culture Vultures had just been published, naturally our avian ears pricked up. Not simply out of vanity, we hasten to add. Not even largely out of vanity. But because the subtitle that follows - Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? - asks a surprising question.
How can a government that has ploughed enormous amounts of cash into the arts sector - £2 billion of National Lottery money since 1994, unprecedented investment from the Treasury, free admission to national galleries and museums - be accused of "damaging" arts in the UK? It sounds absurd, like grumping at someone who's just bought you a shiny new BMW that it's not the right colour.
But Culture Vultures - an excerpt from which we publish on the website today - isn't by any means petty grumbling. It argues that something is radically wrong with New Labour's approach to the arts, which has focused on making them an adjunct to social policy: a tool to engineer everything from urban regeneration and healthcare to crime and community cohesion.
In pushing the arts into the social mainstream, it's alleged that the government has ended up politicising culture and subjecting it to the same airless, box-ticking bureaucracy that now envelops much of Whitehall.
Politicians are never shy of talking up the arts, the book suggests, but instead of nurturing originality and creativity they've instead fostered a form of arts-lite that specialises in feelgood, dumbed-down projects with little real value. And it's high time to puncture the "stifling consensus" about all this, the book's authors reckon.
Strong stuff, and controversial too: the launch on Tuesday night at the Policy Exchange's Whitehall offices was, I discovered, a stormy affair, with plenty of raised hackles and bared fangs on display - not least from representatives of Arts Council England, an institution singled out for special scorn by some of the writers in this book.
And it looks likely to fire up debate, particularly as the Conservative party has attached itself rather gleefully to the project - not least, one supposes, because it fits in rather neatly with their claims about the evils of government control-freakery.
Myself, I admit to being undecided. While it's undeniable that centralised target-speak is tiresome and suffocating, maybe that's a price worth paying for increased funding. And isn't it right that the arts should be more socially engaged, particularly when taxpayers' money is involved? And how do you measure "creativity", anyway?
But while I wobble uneasily on the fence, you don't have to - do read the introduction to the book and, of course, feel to pitch in below. And if you're intrigued by some of the arguments introduced here, the booklet costs £10 and you can get more information at the Policy Exchange's website.
