Tim Worstall

English National Opera.

Mark Lawson makes two points about the English National Opera:

Whatever the
eccentricities of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, it clearly is the
kind of work a subsidised English-language opera house should be
risking.
….
The National’s research
shows that low prices encouraged theatregoers to experiment with
repertoire, but a musical manager told me that, depressingly, most
operas – especially modern, English or daring ones – could not even be
given away.

So, a subsidised English-language opera house simply destroys value. People won’t even turn up for free. This answers this question then:

Can it be acceptable that a body receiving £16.5m of public money annually…

No, clearly it is not acceptable that this body receives any public money. Abolish the Arts Council while we’re about it too.

In

2 responses

  1. P. Froward Avatar
    P. Froward

    I recently saw an old Soviet propaganda poster with two panels: One showed a young violinist in rags, shivering in the rain at night in Manhattan. The other showed the same young violinist in evening dress with a sharp haircut, wowing throngs in a concert hall in the Soviet Union.
    Now, while it’s certainly arguable that the Soviet system fell short of its ideals in certain ways, and one may well concede that the civil liberties situation in that country was hardly perfect, you really can’t deny that there we had a system which valued the arts, in contrast to the extremist radical right-wing position, espoused by Worstall here, which would send opera performers and composers out to starve, freeze, and drown in the rainy windswept streets of Manhattan simply for the sake of their fundamentalist-neoliberal ideology.
    It is important to note that the light in the Soviet concert hall was warm and welcoming, while the desolate streets of New York were lit with the harsh, cold, inhuman glare of American auto headlights.
    If you, Mr. Worstall, were standing on a street corner with your violin, soaked to the skin and dressed in rags, in light which did your complexion no favors at all, you would perhaps less heartlessly condemn artists to an early grave, and you would perhaps be more understanding when artists in savagely competitive cultures like the United States turn in frustration to so-called “terrorism”.
    The freedom to start a company is worth nothing to a drowned violinist, Mr. Worstall. Nothing at all.

    Reply
  2. -keith in mtn. view Avatar
    -keith in mtn. view

    What’s up with the pro-Soviet propaganda posters? How about the harsh, cold, inhuman glare of the Soviet Gulag where many a non-compliant Violinskivich “played” and valued the arts… Sheesh. Besides, “The Bitter Tears” was first a Fassbinder film, and not that good. What’s with all the re-makes these days?

    Reply

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