The BBC News website has a tab labelled 'Entertainment & Arts'. It makes me wonder what they feel is the difference between the two. The implication seems to be that the 'Arts' are not entertaining and that 'Entertainment' is not an art, an idea as insulting as it is patronising. I'm sure the insinuation is unintentional but it is often the unintentional that reveals what one truly thinks. I appreciate that not everyone finds Wagner entertaining and I know that there are many who don't think there is anything artistic about The X-Factor but is that not just a matter of taste? Where there is creativity, there is art, and where there is art, there is entertainment.

Obviously it depends how one defines each word. If there is a difference, I suspect it is a modern one. I am no anthropologist, but in human civilisation the concept of high culture and low culture is probably a relatively recent phenomenon. Mozart saw no contradiction in writing a masterpiece like The Magic Flute for a Viennese suburban popular theatre. Beethoven had no problem arranging a series of Scottish folksongs. And the poorest Elizabethans regularly spent vast proportions of their weekly salaries on watching the latest play by Shakespeare. Of course entertainment that is not in some sense artistic will not survive long but I'm not sure who has the right to decide that in advance or on behalf of others. Whether entertainment is artistic or not is something that only time ultimately decides.

Theodore Adorno felt that popular entertainment represented an enormous threat to high culture. It seems to me though that the biggest threat to high culture is to define it as such in the first place. The idea that the Arts are superior to Entertainment is a dangerous form of snobbery. Not everyone likes classical music, but if they don't we should not alienate them further by suggesting that it is something other than entertainment.

In America, the changing economies are forcing orchestras to seriously engage in how people want to spend their 'Entertainment dollars'. This is an honest acknowledgement of the fact that most people do not distinguish between types of entertainment other than through personal preference. There is a finite amount of money to spend on an almost infinite range of possible activities, including even the option of being entertained without leaving the home. The art forms that are succeeding are the ones that are making themselves the most entertaining, and the ones that are succeeding the most are doing so without compromising on their artistic goals at all.

The best performers do not distinguish between arts and entertainment and I don't believe that audiences do either. Intriguingly, if you access the BBC website from abroad, the heading on the tab only reads 'Entertainment'. I hope this means they think that at least foreigners consider art as entertainment. Either that or they don't think foreigners see art as entertainment at all. Then there really would be a problem.

www.markwigglesworth.com