"The establishment in Britain is certainly against the arts and against education. If something doesn't make a profit, it's invalid, and art doesn't make a profit in that sense"
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Maxwell Davies isn’t whining about arts funding; he’s indicting a whole operating system. “The establishment” is a deliberately blunt villain, the kind you can’t quite locate in one minister or one budget line because it’s embedded in habits: managerial thinking, market logic, the quiet suspicion that anything unmonetizable is a luxury. By pairing “the arts” with “education,” he sharpens the accusation. These are the two arenas that train a public to notice, question, and imagine alternatives - which is precisely why an establishment that prizes stability might prefer them underfed.
The killer move is his use of “invalid.” That’s not “unaffordable” or “low priority.” It’s a moral demotion: profit as the test of legitimacy. He’s describing a cultural climate where value gets flattened into revenue, and where the arts are forced to justify themselves in the language of the spreadsheet. The aside “in that sense” matters, because it concedes a different kind of profit - civic, psychological, long-term - while pointing out how policy debates often refuse to count it. Art does make returns; it just doesn’t behave like a quarterly report.
Contextually, this lands in late-20th-century Britain’s drift toward marketization, when public institutions were increasingly asked to mimic private enterprise. For a composer whose work lives on commissions, ensembles, and public infrastructure, the statement doubles as self-defense and warning: starve the arts, and you don’t just lose concerts. You lose a society’s capacity to think beyond what sells.
The killer move is his use of “invalid.” That’s not “unaffordable” or “low priority.” It’s a moral demotion: profit as the test of legitimacy. He’s describing a cultural climate where value gets flattened into revenue, and where the arts are forced to justify themselves in the language of the spreadsheet. The aside “in that sense” matters, because it concedes a different kind of profit - civic, psychological, long-term - while pointing out how policy debates often refuse to count it. Art does make returns; it just doesn’t behave like a quarterly report.
Contextually, this lands in late-20th-century Britain’s drift toward marketization, when public institutions were increasingly asked to mimic private enterprise. For a composer whose work lives on commissions, ensembles, and public infrastructure, the statement doubles as self-defense and warning: starve the arts, and you don’t just lose concerts. You lose a society’s capacity to think beyond what sells.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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