Summary:
Artists have been criticised for spending more than £500,000 on vanity projects with no tangible purpose.

Full article:
By . Daily Mail Reporter . Susan Adams has been given £20,000 from Arts Council Wales for her Go! Be A Bird! project, to find 'free flow narratives' Taxpayers are paying artists to tour Latin America, make mistakes and ‘grapple with the concept of thing-ness’ in projects denounced as a ‘ridiculous’ and ‘self-indulgent’ waste of money. Those receiving handouts from Arts Council Wales include dancer Gareth Clark, given £24,894  to ‘put himself in a place of contemplation and reflection’. Recently he walked across the 645ft Transporter Bridge in Newport – after which he reflected that he was ‘afraid of heights’. Writer Richard Gwynn has been given £25,000 to tour Latin American in search of ‘poets and wanderers’. He is posting blogs of his adventures. Artist Susan Adams has been given £20,000 for her Go! Be A Bird! project, to find ‘free flow narratives... whose meanings are less clear to her’. And painter Brendan Stuart Burns has been given £20,000 to stop teaching for 12 months, granting him ‘time to make mistakes’. The quango said he was ‘grappling with the concept of thing-ness’. Novelist Julian Ruck called the grants an ‘unmitigated scandal’ and ‘an exercise in pure  self-indulgent impudence and unrepentant 'entitled arrogance’. Arts Council Wales defended the awards, insisting that the money would be ‘well used... to make a contribution to the development of arts’.