Sigh! Probably right .. but then what about grass-roots community events that they might wish to stage? Mass dance-in's (what DO young people want .. mine wants to skulk in his bedroom and play Nirvana painstakingly on his guitar through a cranked up amp **G**)

I reproduce a press cutting I have kept for several years (can anyone pinpoint date?)

ART WILL DO YOU GOOD, POOR TOLD

Tessa Blackstone, the new Minister of State for the Arts, has launched a drive to encourage poorer people to take an active part in the arts writes Vanessa Thorpe.

In a marked departure from the Government's early emphasis on simply broadening audiences and reducing ticket and admission prices, Blackstone wants to ensure more ordinary people get involved in making art.

Blackstone said that a top priority of her Ministry would be to encourage community arts projects with children, patients, the elderly and prisoners, "Opportunity, access, social inclusion, participation will all continue to provide the foundations on which much of our policy will develop in the coming years. But increasing access should be more than just being an audience member."

"It should be about increasing access to participation in the arts," she said, adding that the four key factors in her initiative to bring the arts into ordinary lives would be "excellence", "access", "education", and a recognition of how "vital" the creative economy is to Britain.

Blackstone also said the arts had a key role in helping to improve understanding of Islamic culture, particularly during the present terrorist crisis.

She added she was instinctively opposed to "heavy handed" government censorship of artistic responses to the conflict, including drama and even comedy.

The arts, while valid for their own sake, were a way of reaching excluded groups in society, she concluded. But the arts are not a cure-all for society, she admitted. There was still a danger that 'access to all forms of participation will not significantly change if we cannot the problems that underlie why certain groups of people feel excluded from participating in our cultural life".

----------------
This was printed in a national newspaper and is a couple of years old at least