People in the arts spend a great deal of time bemoaning the lack of governmental support, but is the ignorance of politicians really a great surprise? After all, the arts are everything that politics isn’t: subtle, nuanced, full of deep ideas and gray areas, and imbued throughout with a belief in the intelligence of the audience. “The [UK’s] Labour party used to justify its support of the arts rather as a 19th-century curate’s wife might advocate distributing informative pamphlets to the deserving poor, by their social usefulness… This approach, of course, swaps the robe of the wizard for the coat of the social engineer: it robs art of its chance to enchant.”