Sport, art and activity

"While many artists and arts institutions have wished for an end to the tick boxes and quotas of Blairite "socialist realism", if they now get what they wished for in the form of a flight to "quality" (and the market), will this create more latitude for critical and political art or open the way for unaccountable cuts and capricious, commercially-based funding decisions? In short, what will happen to the money if art stops being sport? As arguments for the economic and "social" value of creative activity and cultural industries are exposed as inflated by economic downturn, both art and sport may turn out to have been mere contributors to the emerging crisis, factories (or at least "digital workshops") of fictitious value whose stream of liquidity is now drying up. However, State funded art, as a relatively weak contributor to major league capital projects such as the Olympics, is likely to feel the squeeze before aestheticised mass sport does..."