It’s a bit of a tricky question, especially for a Monday morning, but what exactly is art for? We know why science exists — to find a cure for cancer, fly us to the Moon or invent those weird bars of metal soap that claim to get the smell of chopped onions off your fingers and which, amazingly, actually work. But what about art? Determining the function and quantifying the success of a painting or a piece of music is almost impossible.

Or is it? According to the journalist and academic Munira Mirza, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) seems to (mistakenly) think it has the answer. In Culture Vultures, a new collection of essays published by the think-tank Policy Exchange (www.policyexchange.org.uk/) Mirza argues that art, or at least the sort of art that the Government wants to sponsor, is being shoe-horned into a partisan programme of reform and social engineering. In other words, the DCMS is not actually expecting artists to fix leaky towerblocks with their own hands; but if they could see their way to making something uplifting to put in the car park, that would be lovely.

Aside from the moral issues, whether this approach can ever succeed is debatable. With science, it’s simple: either the bar of weirdy metal soap works; or it doesn’t. But take a piece of art and who’s to say what will fly, for whom and for what reason.

Two people who otherwise have much in common can disagree violently on the merits of the same piece. Take, for example, Wagner’s Parsifal, an opera that only puts me in mind of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (when it’s not putting me to sleep) but which transports my other half to the highest of lofty planes.

There is no official table of validity for art (critics don’t really count: theirs, too, is inevitably a flawed response, as the frequent imbalance between box-office receipts and critical acclaim proves). Art aims to stimulate the senses and touch the soul, and as we all have different requirements in that respect work can be judged only according to subjective criteria. One man’s triumph is another man’s tragedy, which is why making good art that can please all of the people all of the time is impossible.

But you can see why the Government is tempted. When artists seek to set an agenda, or express a cultural point, they can be unnervingly eloquent. If nothing else the hysteria over the visions of Danish cartoonists in respect of Islam proves the strength of feeling art can generate. And for each bleak and blackened vision, there is a correspondingly uplifting one: Mozart will salve the mind as surely as a Richard Curtis film will float you home from the cinema on a puff of warm air; fix your sight skywards in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and one’s faith in the usefulness of the human race perks up no end.

Art can be provocative, it’s true; but it can also be good for you. It is this therapeutic application, and the perceived social advantages, that Mirza believes the DCMS is most desperate to foster. But, she argues, far from resulting in beautiful and uplifting works, a well-meaning but misguided obsession with “social inclusion” has resulted in a lot of money being spent on a lot of thoroughly mediocre work.

Arts funding in Britain is, of course, at an all-time high, as we are constantly being reminded. Since the inception of the National Lottery in 1994, over £2 billion has been ploughed into the arts in Britain; to match the public’s generosity (because whatever else it is Lottery money is public money), new Labour has been exceedingly free with the chequebook — and of course entry to all national museums and galleries is now gratis.

The overarching intention of all this has been, quite commendably, to improve the cultural health of the nation by making the arts more accessible.

Mirza’s concern is that such generosity has come at a price. She believes that publicly funded art is now expected to prove its value not just from a critical point of view, but also in socio-political terms, and that this is seriously effecting the quality of work being commissioned. The free and inspired expression of the artist’s vision is being stifled by the need to “tick” certain boxes.

The results — these politically correct, emasculated, all- inclusive works that emerge from the mouth of the bureaucratic mangler — are not true to their creators, nor do they provide any concrete advantages to those they are intended to serve.

Her remarks have, understandably, been ill-met in certain artistic circles. But while this book will encounter some justifiable criticism, it also deserves a second look for trying to encourage debate in an area of the arts notoriously hostile to criticism.

If you’ve ever wondered why hospitals where old folk get forgotten in corridors spend thousands on “community” art (to give the old dears something to look at while they languish in corridors?) or marvelled at the cost of the Millennium Dome, a public art project of such stunning banality that it will go down in history as one of the greatest white elephants of the 20th century, then Culture Vultures ought to interest you.

If you also think that artists should be encouraged to express their views freely through their chosen medium, regardless of who or what they may upset, then I doubly urge you to get a copy — before some interfering zealot passes a law against this sort of thing.