Art, creativity and society

I do think governments should fund the arts, but I'd be selective about how. Paying for large prestige projects — a new opera house that a small fraction of the population will ever set foot in — is hard to justify when hospitals are short of beds. Funding art education in ordinary schools, or subsidising cheap studio and rehearsal space in cities where rents are pushing artists out, seems far better value, because it widens who gets to make things rather than just who gets to watch them. The other argument is simply that markets are bad at paying for slow work. A novel or a piece of experimental theatre can take years before anyone knows whether it was worth it, and without some public money only people with wealthy families can afford that risk. On technology and creativity, I'm genuinely torn. On one hand, the tools have never been this accessible: a teenager with a phone can shoot, edit and release a short film in a weekend, something that would have needed a whole crew twenty years ago. On the other hand, when software can generate a passable image or melody in seconds, the temptation is to stop at passable. My guess is that technology will make the average person more creative and the average piece of work less interesting, and that the people who stand out will be the ones who use the tools to go further rather than to stop sooner.