YOUR report on the funding row over T in the Park ("T in the Park row lobbyist on festival payroll", The Herald, August 13) deals with the means used by Jennifer Dempsie to help secure £150,000 for the event, but fails to touch on the wider question of what constitutes artistic need.
Despite heroic inroads occasionally made into T in the Park by Nicola Benedetti and by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, this remains an event extremely populist in scope. Why it should be subsidised at all is an unfathomable mystery.
That little word "culture" has lately acquired a new meaning, wider and more far-reaching than its derivation, "art". It allows our Culture Secretary (Fiona Hyslop) to direct money at events which justify their claims on the public purse, not through artistic merit, nor through desperate need, but simply by proclaiming that everything is in place for success. This is topsy-turvydom.
In the days when Jennie Lee was our first Minister of the Arts (then a branch of the Ministry of Education, an indication of serious purpose if ever there was one) it was the danger of a project's financial failure that justified a grant, not its likely success. Why? Because what was then at issue was the promotion and maintenance of exciting new work, drawing only minority audiences at first but with the hope and belief that in time such work would be experienced by thousands. Who would have believed that Scottish audiences would, in time, flock to Scottish Opera? Had it not been for the faith shown by past entrepreneurs, this venture would not have got off the ground.
It is the guarding against loss which encourages new and rich pickings, not the reinforcement of success. It seems that, together with social security provision, it is no longer acceptable for financial help to be provided so that audiences may experience not what they already want now, but what (given the chance) they may want tomorrow.
Bob Simans,
301 Churchill Drive, Glasgow.
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