Wot! No Art

An entertaining if undeniably muddled retrospective on the social context of the arts in the period 1945-51, the years of the first post-war Labour government and the birth of the Arts Council: days of hope (and austerity) when public patronage for 'public art' was intended to promote a cultural renaissance to complement that in education, health and housing. The film is sound in tracing the dissipation of the dream (making good use of representative newsreels, with their uniquely patronising commentaries), but falters in drawing parallels with today's situation, and is insufficiently rigorous or coherent in its polemical assertion of the status of art as a social priority. Provocative, none the less.