This *is* food for thought but not in the way they think. The graph isn’t measuring relevance it’s measuring importance. And it has split our lives into arbitrary, seperated categories rather than interlocking areas. https://twitter.com/mcnafs/status/1252646999255666689

You just can’t ask this kind of question without context, it’s utterly meaningless. If you ask me what’s more important, ‘The Arts’ or ‘Children’ I’d be psychotic to answer the former. Same with sport. Does anyone think sport has an unpopularity problem in this country? No.

But it’s right down there. Of course it is, when you frame a question like this. Music or Homelessness. Football or Health? It’s nonsense.

And that’s without interrogating the term ‘arts.’ How many people think of listening to Spotify as indulging in a bit of the arts? Settling down to Netflix? It’s The Arts and Chill. When this is over I might pop to the cinema, see the latest arts.

The food for thought is in the framing, it’s how we contextualise culture (and sport, and the environment and...) Ultimately charts like this show us nothing and teach us nothing, except how to fall into a neo liberal/conservative trap of justifying usefulness.

If you ask what’s more important (ie what should we spend money on) the NHS or The Arts, is there a single person who wouldn’t choose our health service? Yet the arts is proving vital right now for people’s mental health and wellbeing.

We have to get better at this. It has to be nuanced. We have to stop jumping through imaginary hoops and concentrate on the real changes that need to be made: how we define culture, how we include everyone’s The Arts, how we demonstrate value in a more meaningful way.

Anyway, it’s a pandemic and schools are closed so I’m going to take my cup of tea and read some picture story arts to my youngest.