Once the apostrophe purists have died prematurely of apoplexy, no one will miss it.Paul DawsonIpswich, Suffolk. Nicholas Timmins’ headline “Health industry breeds fat cats” (1 September) says it all. Privatisation of medicine leads to an industry run by people whose principal objective is to make themselves rich, rather than a service run by people with less selfish motives. If a sign has no effect on pronunciation, why write it? In spoken English the distinction between, say, its and it’s is always clear from the context, so the same must surely apply in writing. If it hadnt been invented, no one would now be demanding its introduction. Art does not need a rich elite; the rich elite no longer needs art. Art needs an audience and, once again, a transformation of society.Paul ObermayerLondon N1.
Whats the point of the apostrophe? (“You say St James’, I say St James’s …”, 1 September) Im convinced its an anachronism. And to state that “if people spend large sums at the top, then you have freedom of expression…” is nonsense. The fact that so much artistic production is now financed by big business is surely one reason why our “culture” is becoming so frighteningly homogeneous.Professor Jardine’s “intellectual” justification for the inevitable underfunding of the arts we can expect under New Labour is predictable. No longer emerging, no longer in any way radical, the capitalists who make up the ruling class of today are the main obstacle to artistic development. One only has to think of the media’s increasingly shrunken and reactionary worldview, chronic underfunding, manipulative advertising and the impoverished repetitions of so much “pop culture” to know this to be true.To compare the opportunism of Sainsburys to the patronage of the Medicis seems a little phoney. Western art is still defined by the cultural trajectory from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and the emerging bourgeoisie she describes were indeed at the vanguard of the revolutionary upheavals in European society at that time. For them, art was an important embodiment of their radical ideals and, eventually, represented truly revolutionary advances in the artistic life of those times (for example, in the works of artists like Beethoven and Schiller).
The situation now is quite different.
I am sure many readers will have found Professor Lisa Jardine’s conclusions about the future of art deeply disappointing (“Labour don says art needs a rich elite”, 1 September). This is something which the local authority associations, and others with an interest in protecting the natural environment, are pursuing with the Government. In the meantime, however, street trees rely for their protection on utility companies and other operators following voluntary codes of practice which lie outside the training required under the New Roads and Street Works Act.
Gavin WilsonAssociation of District CouncilsLondon SW1. The certification of supervisors for highway works, requiring the obtaining of a recognised qualification under the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991, is certainly welcome (“Goodbye road diggers…”, 1 September).
