Arts Council England to fund blogs?

According to The Stage:

In a significant divergence from its historic focus on directly funding the arts itself, ACE has also offered to open its funding streams to artistic or cultural games and “digital content about arts and culture”. This could include blogs and websites about theatre, educational content or documentaries.

Oh, really? We have four things to say about that:

1 Slipped Disc will never apply for public handouts. We don’t need them, and wouldn’t accept them even if we did.

2 Slipped Disc will campaign to its last breath to prevent public money being wasted on ‘digital content about arts and culture’. It would give the ACE editorial influence over online arts expression and stultify further the arena for public debate that has been shrunken by the collapse of print coverage.

3 To raise a proposal of this kind while demolishing a national opera company is proof the ACE is tone deaf.

4 This may be the stupidest, most pernicious idea to emerge from the Arts Council in decades. It needs to be killed stone dead before it flies. We call on other websites to denounce it.