As arts cuts announced today start to bite, few people are aware that the Royal Opera House pays its two top people more than £630,000 and nearly £400,000 each. Although Covent Garden is refusing to identify them, it is likely that they are chief executive Lord Hall and music director Antonio Pappano. But they are not likely to have to sacrifice their earnings even while smaller arts organisations fold.

Sadler’s Wells launched their 2011 season this morning with a warning that the front-loading of arts cuts to the next two years will cut a swathe through the British arts landscape.

It began with a review of 100 Years of German Song. Roused by a comment to a reader (see Igor's comment below), Fisun was moved to email Igor in support of his trenchant views on arts funding. It wasn't long before other writers at theartsdesk got involved and an eruption of lively and passionate emails followed.

As we take in news of the cuts that the arts will have to absorb, and wait for the Cassandras to start hollering, it's important to remind ourselves of one arts venue that won't be wiping one bead of sweat off its brow as a result of today's announcements: the Wigmore Hall. This season, Britain's finest chamber music venue has a line-up of unsurpassed quality and variety. Yet it does so with less subsidy than any other equivalent music organisation in the country. Cuts in state subsidy do not end quality. They improve it.

Frontline public funding for arts will be cut by some 15 per cent over the next four years, said the Chancellor George Osborne today, as he announced a cut of almost half in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport budget, from £1.9 billion to £1.1 billion. Arts Council England's funding will be cut by almost 30 per cent over that period, starting with a 14 per cent reduction for next year.

With the Frieze Art Fair now upon us, the only sane response for anyone interested in art is to leave London until the wretched event is over. Art fairs are for art what pimps are for virgins, to misquote Barnett Newman. The work, in other words, doesn’t stand a chance. And just as supermarkets don’t give shelf space to products for you to admire the packaging, art fairs don’t display work for you to look at and enjoy. In each case, the point is to purchase.

Nowadays it’s not so easy to find a doc you can trust. Since talent shows started supplying back stories as part of an all-in-one narrative package, it’s as if everyone has learnt how to behave when there’s a camera crew around. Meanwhile, in the cutting room film-makers can be quite as manipulative as colleagues who nakedly trade in fiction. But there are some things you can’t fake. A young male troupe of cheerleaders from rough working-class south Leeds? That’s one of them.

Members of the artistic communities have been campaigning for weeks now against the imminent cuts in the subsidies given to the arts (see David Shrigley’s clever video here). All arts organisations have been told, in the latest money-saving initiative, to rewrite their budgets with a 10 per cent cut in their Arts Council grant. These are the lucky ones – the Arts Council has indicated that some bodies will have their entire grant removed.

Culture Minister Ed Vaizey joined BBC Radio 4 Call You and Yours to debate public arts funding, joining a panel and answering phonecalls and emails from the public. The government will be incorporating some of the public comments into its current decisions on arts funding. This is a simultaneously typed rough transcript of the programme.

The Arts Council of England has escaped the government axe - unlike the UK Film Council. Reports over the past week or two paint a grim picture of diminishing arts budgets in Scotland, Wales and England while the Conservative-Lib Dem Government takes its machete to what it considers the fat in public spending.

The ACE is already implementing a £23 million cut in its 2010-11 budgets originally set at £468 million - £4million ordered last year in Darling's budget, another £19million now. Detailed budgets for supported arts organisations will become clearer over the autumn.