I have been fascinated, but also a bit shocked by the response to my blog post of yesterday about the report commissioned by the Arts Council on the future of opera.  I have obviously not been paying close attention to the way these decisions are made (or ducked).

In the first place, there does seem something a tiny bit odd in the fact that a report on the future of opera, a subject of great importance, should be subcontracted by the Treasury to DCMS who subcontract decision-making to the Arts Council who are expected surely to have the appropriate in-house expertise, but who decide instead to subcontract the report to a consultancy in Liverpool run by an ex-special advisor in the Department of International Development who recruits someone writing a PhD at the University of Nottingham whose expertise is not in opera, but in cultural studies.

Isn’t this a very long-winded and expensive way of avoiding responsibility for decision making ?  You get someone to say that you cannot make a decision based on excellence and then wash your hands of it.

It doesn’t look good.