The BBC's Live Sites 2012 program is set to roll out 60 big screens in urban centres around the UK by 2012. Considering the vague agenda currently guiding their use, Richard Wright asks whether these big screens will ever open themselves to creative use or simply remain giant TVs controlled by giants
 

The late Derek Bailey's musical 'career' was founded on years of wage labour as a guitarist in dancehalls and nightclubs. An idea which aspirants to today's fully professional-entrepreneurial cultural sector would find barely comprehensible, suggests Matthew Hyland. For what other than individual elevation above wage-worker status defines the 'creative' life that these subvention-seekers clamour for so shrilly?

With £112.5 million of Arts Council England’s Lottery share now earmarked to help pay for the Olympics overspend, it’s the arts sector, not just the athletes, who’ll be feeling the burn. James Heartfield surveys the results of New Labour’s ten year arts funding spree and wonders, should we care if it’s over? And will James get paid if it is?

The diversion of funds from Arts Council England to the Olympics has provoked an elitist championing of art over sport when, argues Dave Beech, the point is to refuse such a choice

The idea of diverting state funds away from art to a spectacle of sport sounds like a fantastic futurist demand. Demolish museums! Worship the beauty of speed! It still reads as a refreshing inversion of what Bourdieu called ‘pleasure devoid of pleasure’ – the aesthetic love of art.