David Lister: The Week in Arts

One of the few joys of travelling on the Tube is the Poems on the Underground series. On my particular line the speed of the journey is such that on an average day I could probably have time to read the whole of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", let alone one verse. But never mind. At least there's a little poetry to help the commute.

A few years ago the idea spread from the Tube to 1,500 doctors' surgeries. The scheme, called Poems in the Waiting Room, has been supplying 1,500 surgeries with free poetry cards. This week the organisers published a collected edition. The names in it are largely famous ones - Shakespeare, Keats, Hardy, Blake etc, though there is also a sprinkling of contemporary poets including Carol Ann Duffy, who is president of the scheme.

But it seems that a sprinkling of modern poets is not enough. It has to be more than a sprinkling, and it has to be a very precise sprinkling. For, along with the collected edition comes a plaintive note from the book's editor Michael Lee saying that 1,000 of these surgeries will no longer receive the poetry service as the Arts Council refuses to fund it. Cutbacks in the NHS have even reached the poems on the walls.

The reason why the Arts Council is withholding money is that the poems are the wrong sort of poetry. Mr Lee, who has been funding the charity out of his own pocket, explains: "The Arts Council will not back Poems in the Waiting Room since it is based on classical poems drawn from the heritage of English verse with some contemporary work... They insist that we publish only contemporary writers with a heavy bias of works from ethnic minority poets. There is no inkling whatsoever of any demand from patients for this type of poetry. The Council has no understanding or experience of the needs of NHS patients."

I wish he hadn't said that. No doubt, an NHS familiarisation course is even now a gleam in the eye of some Arts Council bureaucrat. The debate is an old one in arts circles. Should the Arts Council, the national funding body for cultural projects, put money into sustaining the classics or concentrate on funding new work? One would have thought that the simple, uncontroversial answer is that it should do both. When it funds such bodies as the National Theatre it does do both. The National is not told that it can stage only new plays and must not touch Shakespeare or Ibsen.

I'd have thought that any scheme that brings poetry into people's daily life is unusual and commendable enough to warrant funding. Do we really need to be arguing about what is the right sort of poetry? Mr Lee concludes: "The Arts Council seeks to take effective editorial control over the selection of poetry in pursuit of its sociological objectives."

If so, that mirrors what is going on elsewhere in the arts. Museums, for example, now have to show that they are getting the right balance of age, class and ethnic groupings through their doors when they apply for increases in funding.

But having to have the correct quota of ethnic minority and contemporary poets on the waiting room wall does seem to be losing sight of a very reasonable objective: using great art to help people through trying times. And I suspect that in a GP's waiting room we are more grateful for the familiar and the soothing than for the new and the challenging. We are, after all, not in the best frame of mind to concentrate.

As cultural services go, this is a pretty commendable one. Give the guys their money.

White rabbits for sale

Sooner or later even the most revered pop and rock songs get used as backing tracks for adverts. Nevertheless, it still came as a shock this week when I turned on the TV and saw some consumable or other being advertised to the music of Jefferson Airplane's 1967 hippie anthem "White Rabbit". The druggy lyrics referencing Alice in Wonderland, the haunting tune and the ultra-cool band all contributed to the song's seminal place in rock history. But song and band are best remembered for the lead singer Grace Slick (pictured), an ethereal and mysterious beauty, who has achieved what so few rock stars achieve: she seems to have disappeared without trace, rather than souring the memory with a middle-aged comeback.

It's a pity that her most famous number couldn't have been left in the memory too. It is a song that evokes either golden summers or smoky, esoteric student debates over lyrics. It is not a song one wants to find plugging a product in the middle of Coronation Street.

* This week a special festival to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth opened in Vienna. The highlights will come to London's Barbican Centre next summer. The festival was special because a maverick opera and theatre director was given the job of curating it, and the funding to do so. It was also special because it didn't actually contain any Mozart.

Peter Sellars asked contemporary composers, film-makers, choreographers and artists to create their own works, responding to themes that Mozart explored in his music. What were these themes? They were such things as transformation, forgiveness and death. To put it another way, they were the sort of themes that have been explored by nearly every composer, dramatist and artist who ever lived. Or, to put it yet another way, under the auspices of a Mozart festival, the wily Mr Sellars has been able to do whatever he wanted.