Save the Arts

So, I don’t usually use my blog for this sorta thing, but just this once, I will, so there!

As you know, I work as a lighting designer when not doing this novel-writing thing, and as a recently graduated LD, I am naturally paid pittance to work in a wide range of exciting venues on shows that range from the sublime to the traumatic.  (So far mostly sublime, with one or two off-days en route…)

And as you also know, it being hard to miss, we are entering a time of economic cut back and budget-slashing in which all areas of government spending are going to take a hit, the arts included.  And absolutely, I see the need, (although Keynes might have a few things to say about the method…) and of course the arts must take its hit.  But with spending cuts proposed somewhere between 20-30% on a budget that is already tiny, to affect an industry that is one of the proudest in the UK and which lures in tourists and money from across the world, is arguably slashing for the sake of saying it’s slashed, rather than because it makes huge fiscal sense.  (See this bracket?  This is incidentally the bracket in which I fail to start my rant about the nature of the British nuclear deterrent.)

While I along with every other sensible technician, actor, producer, director, dancer, artist, writer etc. accepts the need for cuts, what the government is proposing at the moment seems disproportional considering the small expenditure and great benefits reaped by with and for the arts, with which in mind, and here’s the biased abuse of blog moment…

… there’s this petition….

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-the-arts.html

… and while it’s always debatable what effect a petition will have, at 100,000 signatures the government will have to at least debate it and if in doubt, as yourself this.  Is it really worth not signing?