Here's a correspondent in the paper, one Lynne Alderson, pointing to research from France showing that that the 2009 Picasso exhibition in Aix-en-Provence "earned 62m euros of additional income for the town" against a measly investment of only 6m. So the government "should look to the long-term financial benefits of spending in the arts".
I'm as well-disposed to arts funding as the next person, but this just won't do. For starters, what would have happened to that 62m if it hadn't been spent in Aix? Would it have been kept under the mattresses of hundreds of middle-class culture-loving households the length and breadth of France? Would the bien-pensant have said to themselves, "We were going to spend this money, but because that Picasso exhibition didn't go ahead, we're now going to keep it stashed away"? Of course not. They'd have stuck it in the bank, invested it, or spent it somewhere else. So the money might not have gone to Aix, but it would have gone somewhere and someone would have made use of it.
But there's more. What if instead of spending the money on a Picasso exhibition the French government had spent it instead on, oh I don't know, something like tax breaks for Research and Development in industry? Now that wouldn't just have sucked in money from French consumers, it would ultimately have brought in money from overseas via exports.
So whilst Paris not spending 6m Euros at all would probably still have brought a 62m Euro benefit to the economy, spending 6m on something not related to the arts might have brought in a still greater benefit.
Those of us with an artistic interest to declare are not famously good with numbers: "bean-counters", we sneer at the accountants, satisfied that if they know the price of everything, we alone know its true value. Yet all the above is flippin' obvious to anyone bright enough to tie their own shoelaces, and its truly depressing to see that there are still people reliant on slip-ons and velcro amongst both the Guardian's readership and the people that edit the paper.
