Making a case for the arts – and in particular for arts funding, against the competing claims of more readily quantifiable benefits, like health and education – is always a tricky one. When arts administrators and artistic directors state their claims, it is often in the language of the generically self-evident rather than specifically proven: the arts matter, “because they are universal; because they are non-material; because they deal with daily experience in a transforming way; because they question the way we look at the world; because they offer different explanations of that world,” suggested John Tusa of the Barbican Centre, when he first published a volume of essays six years ago about his time in the arts world.
In today’s Guardian, he brings that definition up-to-date and tries to make it more specific: “The arts matter because they are local and relevant to the needs and wishes of local people. They help citizens to express their needs and to clothe them in memorable forms. They offer a way of expressing ideas and wishes that ordinary politics do not allow. The arts regenerate the run-down and rehabilitate the neglected. Arts buildings lift the spirits, create symbols that people can identify with, and give identity to places that may not have one. Where the arts start, jobs follow.”
But he discovers, the arts still resist a definitive economic valuation, but that’s no reason not to fund them: “The final value of the arts cannot be predicted or quantified”, he writes, but “to curtain them on these grounds is to deny the possibility of an unpredictable benefit. The risk of funding the arts offers benefits far greater than the immediate gains of not funding them…. The investment in the arts is so small, the actual return so large, that it represents value as research into ideas.”
