{"id":589,"date":"2004-11-10T08:27:38","date_gmt":"2004-11-10T16:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp\/2004\/11\/okay_pretend_we_didnt_ask\/"},"modified":"2004-11-10T08:27:38","modified_gmt":"2004-11-10T16:27:38","slug":"okay_pretend_we_didnt_ask","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/main\/okay_pretend_we_didnt_ask.php","title":{"rendered":"Okay, pretend we didn&#8217;t ask"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The UK National Lottery <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artdaily.com\/section\/news\/index.asp?int_sec=2?_new=11549\">just turned 10 this week<\/a>, and celebrated a history of public gambling that brought \u00a316 billion of construction and contribution to the country&#8217;s social infrastructure (you can see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/arts\/gallery\/0,8542,1331814,00.html\">some of the funded construction projects here<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>\nAs part of the celebration, they asked the public to identify the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/arts\/news\/story\/0,11711,1345943,00.html\">lottery projects that had &#8216;made the biggest overall impact<\/a> on UK life during the first decade of lottery funding.&#8217; The winner was not the Tate Modern, the Great Court of the British Museum, or any other cultural construction. Instead, the biggest overall impact came from a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sustrans.org\/default.asp?sID=1090412763593\">national bicycling network<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\nTraditional arts projects didn&#8217;t win the day in other categories either, falling behind the Welsh millennium coastal park in the &#8216;amazing space&#8217; category, and the New Bolton Lads and Girls club among projects having impact on children.<\/p>\n<p>\nIt makes perfect sense that the public should select high-volume, socially relevant capital projects as having the most impact on their lives. It&#8217;s just an indication of why we&#8217;re often so squeamish about doing balanced and thoughtful research on the economic impact of the arts. When we throw a wide range of options for public spending into the mix, the arts may not come out on top.<\/p>\n<p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The UK National Lottery just turned 10 this week, and celebrated a history of public gambling that brought \u00a316 billion of construction and contribution to the country&#8217;s social infrastructure (you can see some of the funded construction projects here). As part of the celebration, they asked the public to identify the lottery projects that had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}