ABSTRACT
Economists have ‘meddled’ in matters of the arts since at least the time of Adam Smith (Towse 1997b: xiii; De Marchi and Greene 2005; De Marchi 1999). Many years later and closer to our own times, Lord Keynes, a famous member of the Bloomsbury Group and first head of the Arts Council of Great Britain, displayed a keen interest in the arts. Keynes considered:
that these things [the arts] cannot be successfully carried on if they depend on the motive of profit and financial success. The exploitation and incidental destruction of the divine gift of the public entertainer by prostituting it to the purpose of financial gain is one of the worser [sic] crimes of present-day capitalism. How the state could best play its proper part is hard to say. We must learn by trial and error. But anything would be better than the present system. The position today of artists of all sorts is disastrous.
(Keynes 1936: 344) As manager of what was then the ‘temporary’ Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts in 1942, Keynes helped turn that now forgotten body into the recognisable Arts Council of Great Britain. Keynes ensured that funding and support for the Arts Council came directly from the senior, central and powerful Treasury agency of the UK government, reflecting his understanding of the methods and machinery of government (Moggridge 2005: 538).