Alongside this the arts community has become adept at playing the economic game, piggy-backing on to social issues and presenting itself as dynamic and at the root of all prosperity. So the presence of public art is claimed as being integral to the regeneration of rundown urban areas, although there's no real evidence for this. They are pressed into the services of greater social cohesion, and are claimed to be vital in the enhancement of individual self-esteem (again, with little to back up such assertions). Rigorous intellectual assessment of their individual merits, at least in the public arena, has been replaced by what can only be described as a warm, fluffy approach which demands that anything deemed "creative" is good and therefore beyond criticism.    

But behind all the surface glitter, the worrying truth is that the general stock of knowledge about culture—in the educative, artistic and indeed historical sense of the word—is at a low ebb. People might go to Tate Britain in their hundreds of thousands but that doesn't mean that they know or care much about what they're seeing (the building, arguably, is what the tourists come to see in this particular case). And on a more fundamental level, an aspiration to knowledge and learning, and to a belief that the acquisition of culture is something good in and of itself, has, I suggest, diminished sharply in Britain. 

For large sections of society, it is now possible to live a life in which one simply never comes across the arts or what we might call high culture in general. The proliferation of television channels has had an enormous effect here. In the days of my Benjamin Britten programme, it was still possible to stumble over something in the schedule which sparked a hitherto undiscovered interest, simply because there was nowhere else to look. But the gradual hiving off of "specialist" subject matter on to the niche channels has meant that such happy chances are now very rare, if not extinct.   

But it was not just about technological change. Nor was it the fault of the triumph of the marketplace under Thatcherism, with its supposed belief in the supremacy of "bums on seats". Far more important than both of these was the fact that, in the postwar years, the gatekeepers of what used to be called high culture lost confidence in what they were supposed to be guarding. Often loaded with liberal guilt and self-criticism, they lived in fear of accusations of elitism and the concurrent charge of "inaccessibility". It was not their place to attempt to impose their "bourgeois" taste on the masses. Cultural relativism waged a war which transformed attitudes to art and the appreciation of it. There would be no value judgments made, no order of merit. The pop group Slade could stand on the podium alongside Stravinsky and few, if any, onlookers (regardless of their private thoughts) would dare suggest that perhaps one was of the greater value than the other. If this seems like an exaggeration, then it is worth pondering now whether one could imagine hearing a case put that the work of Beethoven and Mozart are intrinsically superior to, say, African tribal music.