FUNDING for the arts will be targeted at the highly profitable market for hard-core erotica.
Culture secretary Maria Miller stressed that subsidy for the arts must be based on sound economics and called for more publicly-funded close-ups of intercoursing genitalia.
She said: “Taxpayers need to know their money is not being frittered away on a weird statue, or a short film about an old man who used to do a thing.
“Who wants to watch that – apart from some hipster arsehole with too much time on his hands?”
She added: “I spoke to people in the pornographic cinema industry and they told me they were all very rich indeed. They assured me that films about two, or more, people having hard, crazy sex were cheap to produce and more popular than cheese.”
Suggesting that subsidised British pornography could be at the ‘quality end of the spectrum’, Miller said: “Emmanuelle 2 was very tasteful with some lovely cinematography. It wasn’t just some slap-dash fuck-fest.”
A spokesman for the Arts Council said: “Perhaps in the background we could have someone holding up a painting by a young British artist?”
Miller also insisted that a thriving culture could enhance Britain’s diplomatic efforts by projecting something called ‘soft power’.
She added: “It sounds filthy, doesn’t it?”
