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length principle. It is particularly relevant if it concerns judgements about artistic quality.
Incentives to sit on committees of the Arts Council are not big. Peers love you until you
recommend lowering or scrapping subsidy. Subsidy addiction and the public shaming of committee
members sustain the tyranny of the status quo. It takes much time and effort for committee members to
do a proper job. Furthermore, it is not certain that one's advice convinces the rest of the committee and
that the committee's recommendation is followed. If committees are large, one must listen to many
opinions and it is tough to put a well-argued case. Hence, costs of sitting on committees are high and
benefits small. Many experts find sitting on these committees a waste of time and effort, stressful and
even humiliating. Tullock (1971) argues that there is a real danger that meetings are long and dull, suffer
from comment pollution and members merely proffering personal opinions without attempting to get to
grips with the issues concerned. To improve matters, it is important to keep committees not larger than
six of seven members and give them well-specified tasks with clear criteria and priorities. In addition, the
government should promise to follow the recommendations provided they satisfy the criteria and do
justice to the priorities set in advance by the government.
The government should also follow these principles in order to avoid having to make individual
tradeoffs between, say, the artistic merits of theatre group A versus those of theatre group B. The
government should avoid the accusation of state art. Still, given that funds are scarce, the government
must set clear criteria and priorities. The cultural sector and art critics often argue that the government
should not do that: all art is valuable (and deserves subsidy) and the cherished autonomy of the arts is
often used to keep and demand more subsidies. The government must be careful not to succumb to such
lobbies, but refrain from making artistic value judgements about individual cultural expressions. The
pressure from the cultural sector, art critics, the press, voters and parliamentarians to form a positive
artistic judgement is particularly strong if the Arts Council recommends a subsidy cut. As a result,
political debate concentrates on the victims and cultural policy tends to be incremental and catering for
the status quo. Klamer (1996) argues that politicians will loose the rhetoric arguments, since the cultural
sector including the critics are much better able to make their case. Many observers will support the
lobby if only to show their cultural love in the spirit of Bourdieu. It is thus crucial that the government
clearly lays down the rules of the game in advance of the applications for subsidy, because otherwise it
will succumb to pressure to overthrow negative artistic judgements of the Arts Council. If an organisation
gets subsidy despite a negative advice, a legal precedent is set and other cultural organisations that do not
have their subsidies reinstated have a good case in court.
Each system for the allocation of cultural subsidies has different perversions. Stimulating demand
across the board carries little danger of rent seeking and lobbying and avoids protection of the status quo,
but suffers from dead-weight losses and bias towards middle of the road culture. The French or Italian