Who can say what makes art great?

The pervading sense of pessimism is rampant and real and comes from realising that this government's ideological intent is to ruin state-supported culture for a long, long time.

Against that backdrop, I wish to talk about one particular flawed goal of the Arts Council and other funding organisations when divvying up taxpayers' cash.

It may be an uncomfortable moment to make this argument, but if we are ever to salvage something worthwhile from the wreckage, it ought to be acknowledged.

The problem lies with the key stated goal to support "great art." In other words, the part of the funding body's remit that purports to decide whether the art proposed by a project is good or not.

This utterly subjective element of assessing quality is only one part of how they choose who gets our money, but it is a load-bearing pillar, occupying the minds of everyone involved. Load-bearing and built on the cheap - this goal of the Arts Council funding process is immoral.

Art is subjective. We might not know for hundreds of years whether something we create today is relevant or not. We will likely never truly know. The eternal imbalance of populism and deeper worth has not - and will not - be solved and, in fact, we don't want a solution because the conversation about it is half the game of art-making in the first place.

There is not a piece of art or craft out there that a smart person cannot either defend for its greatness or destroy as being without value - and it's fun, except when public funds and lifelong artmaking livelihoods are at stake.

Yes, art is subjective. Regardless of training, experience or any other bullshit, nobody at the Arts Council - and nobody the Arts Council hires to make those decisions for them - knows any better than you or me.

To have a system where our public money is spent according to the subjective taste of whoever makes that funding decision is a drastic, soul-deep wrong and also a strategic disaster for these reasons.

First, it forces the system to tend towards a reneging of the responsibility of making that decision. By which I mean that since, deep down, shamefully, they know it is wrong, they put phenomenal amounts of time and effort into building barriers between themselves and the decision-making process - channelling everything through buffer organisations who do the curating, or A&Ring, or hiring, for them.

Thus the execrable, inexorable rise to power of the professional form-filler. A monumental betrayal of art-makers and consumers alike. The construction industry of faux self-justifying gibberish.

Second, it kills the focus on the ways they should pick projects to support - assess the need of the audience, the need of the artist and the commitment to practice and work ethic of the artist.

Surely there's enough in those three to keep these bastards occupied without them having to pronounce nebulous, world-ruining gibberish on quality?

Speaking at Norwich Sound and Vision Conference on a panel about public funding, a founder of the Merseyside-based Generator organisation explains how he will pick a young band that he thinks "could make it" in an entirely commercial sense, regardless of creative value, though of course it's going to boil down to whether he digs them, or worse, whether he likes their haircuts.

He'll then spend "only" £10,000 releasing a couple of singles by that band to see if they can capture an audience in that time-frame. And, if not, they're dropped.

He's salaried to behave like the worst kind of record industry executive with a credit card built from taxation.

In Brighton, the vast city-wide White Night event is denied funding, while four individual pieces scheduled to take place within it are commissioned, so that the Arts Council can spin that it somehow supported the event that it actually shackled.

Nobody can argue, because everyone's terrified of pissing off the local reps and ruining their own futures.

Similarly, for Brighton Digital Festival - an event I've praised in these pages - there isn't enough money for the steering committee to print a brochure, yet one contributing organisation scores £50,000 to put into a handful of specific "major" commissions, including at least one that is already publicly funded just to exist.

This is the difference between having an opinion on a piece of culture and deciding that your opinion has more value than other people's. But no, it does not.

Because - sigh - art is subjective. The idea that these people spot "great" art is objectively impossible to assess but, over and over again, they patently fail. But that's just my opinion. Project after project is not worth the money it is given, compared to what that money could do, if they removed that subjective "great art" goal from the equation.

It is not just wrong, or poor strategy, or a minor short-term mis-step, it is totally immoral.