English playwright David Edgar has a good, long essay in the Guardian on the UK's arts funding crisis and especially the crisis in how to argue for the arts in a time of official, imposed "austerity." While his persepctive is exclusively Brit-based, analogies are not hard to find here. He begins with some helpful history of shifting justifications for arts funding over time, reminding us how conservative eliti…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:20PM on January 13, 2012