Why The Arts Should be Funded OR Why Everyone Should Learn an Art or Skill

Up and down the UK, local councils are making up for their poor budgeting and imposed cuts by cutting 100% of arts funding. One hundred percent. They are essentially wiping arts companies off the map. They make the arts seem like an unnecessary luxury, but the reason ‘luvvies’ and the ‘artsy-fartsies’ (as people like to write-us-off), feel so strongly about the arts is how it changes them once they experience it. This is my case for why the arts have to be funded.

If we learn to do something, we learn to see something.

I am a writer. When I write, I develop a special relationship to words. How I see words on the page and words that people use in the world around me in conversation, or commercial advertisements or articles in the newspaper set off explosions in my brain. My friend said to me the other day:

Breaking Bad is really good

My brain exploded. The antithesis in the sentence made me laugh. She looked at me with curiosity. When I repeated it back to her stressing the good and bad and explaining the antithesis, she looked at me as if I was an alien. I then explained that the rhythm in the sentence was fascinating too.

Dah de Dah de Da de Da – It’s an unfinished line of trochaic poetry. The first syllable in stressed, the second unstressed and so on. The sentence lit my mind up, it sounded wonderful. the beat of the poetry coming out of the ordinary.

Writing has helped me SEE another aspect of the world, it has illuminated something special in a completely ordinary interaction and it has brought art to my humdrum conversation. But without writing in my life, I wouldn’t have noticed.

And without experience of acting, people in general aren’t aware of dramatic literature, about good script writing, about the tactics people use on each other, about seeing the world through a screen, through repetition, we learn to read behaviour, but also to react instinctively uncensored.

I’m not saying everyone should be an actor. I’m saying by learning something new, you learn to see the world differently, not just learning the thing. So if you don’t fancy acting, try a language, or dance, or cake decorating, or drawing, or furniture restoration. Whenever you learn to do something, you learn to see something.

This is the reason that I believe that the arts should be funded, because ‘seeing’ makes us better, as people, as groups, as societies. Surely every council wants better societies. And then they cut the funding and wonder why people become docile, apathetic and angry?

COACH