never so badly... er...

art, casting its glow on the deep complexities of society

We could be on the verge of a new Renaissance - just like the one they had in 15th-century Italy. Hurrah! And it's not even an overstatement, according to the culture minister (who he? ed.), but is "exactly true."

"Exactly!" That makes it practically scientific! Leonardo da Vinci would love it. Let's resurrect him.

Apparently it's all about changing from a "target"-driven arts funding establishment to an "excellence"-driven one - so says a report about to be published by the government, written by Sir Brian McMaster, an ex-director of the Edinburgh Festival (hereinafter known as "The "Edinburgh International Festival"). It all sounds like a jolly good idea, of course. Excellence! Let's have some more of it. It even sounds a bit like Excelsior! But what is it? How can you tell when you've got it?

Let us see if the words of McMaster himself shed any light on this mystery. In the Guardian's article on the report, he says that 'the society we now live in is arguably the most exciting it has ever been', and the arts 'have never been so needed to understand the deep complexities of Britain today'. He argues for a new 'appreciation of the profound value of the arts and culture'."

In case you are in any doubt as to what those meaningless strings of phrases might mean, the culture minister is on hand again to clarify it for us: it's 'the reclamation of excellence from its historic elitist undertones'."

So: just like the Renaissance then! Will we shake off the shackles of the mediaeval Church and rediscover the intellectual and cultural glories upon which so much of our civilisation is based? Will we discover perspective?

Will we discover how to mix any two pigments, I mean tenses, to create a tense that previously existed only in our own imaginations? Or will "the society we now [sic, & model's own italics] live in" continue to be cut off cruelly from how exciting it "has ever been"? Or was it not so exciting back when it wasn't happening yet? And will the government fund a study to find out how badly the arts used to be "needed to understand the deep complexities of Britain today"? Or, in the past, did they not really care how jolly complex we would be today?

Or should, if we're going to fund people out of the public purse (you know, the one with your money and my money in it) to write reports that could decide if this clarinettist or that theatre director is going to have to retrain as an electrician, should we make sure they know what art is, what it's actually for, and - er - how to construct a sentence that isn't complete gibberish? As a poet, as a poet who may yet come to have a stake in all this excellence-based funding malarkey, I'd like to think that the people who thought it up could recognise excellence in my art if they tripped over it. But let's just stick to the basics for now.

Let's say, the visual arts.

Sadly, the article fails to give any concrete reason - that is, a reason based on some empirical evidence from "today's" art world rather than from its own theoretical posturing - why we might be on the brink of something as amazing as Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Giotto, Pisanello and Botticelli (i.e., all the Ninja Turtles) all at the same time. We'll have to imagine that for ourselves. We've rediscovered the diamond-encrusted skull! Er - I know... And we've made a very referential video of a renaissance-type bowl of fruit, filmed it rotting, and speeded up the film so the flies buzz, ike, really extra-fast... I mean because in today's busy society, the gallery-goer might not get that a bowl of fruit is about mortality unless they can see it rotting before their eyes - kind of like as if it was on TV, yeah, that's it - 'cause, you know, we never let fruit rot these days. We just stick it in the fridge and then we throw it out.

So yeah, its gonna be just like a new Renaissance, only we gotta get the policies right. Then the people can produce something really "world-class" (the culture minister's term, not mine!).

So, let's see. We'll have Hirstonardo, Quinntelangelo, Taylor-della-Wood, Eminanello... Let's see.

Nope. I'm not seeing it.

Or - just to get serious for a minute - does the minister's use of that word "world-class" betray something else at the root of all this, something about export markets and the revenue from BritArt...?

I totally - don't get me wrong - me and all my mates down the pub totally applaud an excellence-based arts funding strategy. But if that's really what McMaster and his friend want, why are they still talking as if it was all about targets? Why do they think that merely "world-class" (clearly in market terms) is the same as the greatest art ever known the history of the Western world, which by the way is not going to be possible to create in our culture of today, which persistently worships mediocrity? Sorry. Deeply complex. Our deeply complex culture. Why are they using phrases like "society today"? You know and I know, and my mates know, that these people are still carrying their mental ticklist, they'll say "but how many people went to the gallery", and they'll still think poetry's "elitist".

Around about this point, are you wondering what Orson Welles (henceforth to be known as Wellesavaggio) would say about all this? So was I. (I have it on good authority that this isn't a Greene-scripted line, btw, despite the credits, funding conditions, etc, but came, ad hoc - if that isn't too elitist a phrase - from the Great Man himelf.) He'd say: "in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

But enough of movies. Words not mentioned in the Guardian article - though the report, Supporting Excellence in the Arts, might be worth a read and a giggle - include any variant of "beauty" or "beautiful"; "artist", "education", "life", "challenging", "intellectual", "aesthetic", "drawing skills," etc etc. Or "patronage".

But don't laugh too much. It's published on Thursday. Better to start grinding your lapis lazuli, things could go mega.