Even visitors from distant galaxies will be aware that, when it comes to the arts, state munificence is not what it was. Cuts are biting deep into an industry which is not always able to provide facts and figures in support of its importance to national wellbeing. When public money runs dry, the only other source is private wealth. But even sponsors and benefactors are feeling the pinch these days, so a new initiative has been announced to address the problem by going directly to consumers of the arts.

As a south-east Londoner and a parent, I was overjoyed recently to discover the Blackheath Conservatoire and its range of family-friendly musical activities – and sad to realise that like so many arts institutions in the current climate it is under threat of closure. It is in fact in the very final stages of a fundraising drive to refinance its debt and prevent its demise – moving steadily towards a donation target of £175,000 needed by the end of this month.

So Tony Hall moves from heading the Royal Opera House to taking over the BBC as its new Director-General. I can't for a moment imagine a rerun of that crucial mini-conversation between Helen Boaden and George Entwistle over the Jimmy Savile programming (if you can remember all the way back to mid-October through the cannonfire since) taking anything like a similar course had it been Tony Hall rather than Entwistle.

So the chairman of Big Brother TV becomes chairman of the Arts Council. Is it good or bad that Sir Peter Bazalgette will now hold the purse-strings for our publicly supported arts, the most debated, the most fragile, the most ephemeral elements of our national cultural consciousness, the most opposite of the time-wasting that is reality TV?

Donatella Flick, one of Britain's most important arts patrons, is furious. "Madness!" she cries in her lush Italian voice. "This is a country that was fantastic, and now there's a demolition going on, bit by bit!" We're sitting in Sir Winston Churchill's old drawing room - now her drawing room - near Kensington Gardens, and I would give a lot to see David Cameron flinching on her huge black sofa as he got a withering dressing-down.

The organisation that channels public money to generate today's new classical music has been resoundingly condemned this week by all of Britain's most important composers. In an open letter, signed by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Colin Matthews, Nicola LeFanu, Julian Anderson and 250 more, the British contemporary music-making establishment accuses Sound and Music - set up by the Arts Council three years ago - of having alienated virtually all the composers it was set up to work with.

For a small(ish) city, Belfast punches well above its weight where the arts are concerned. Northern Ireland's capital may have only 270,000 residents (with a further 500,000 in its catchment area), but it has a notable array of large venues serving several art forms in a vibrant cultural scene. The city houses the Grand Opera House and the newly renovated Lyric Theatre, the Odyssey Arena, the Kings Hall, the Ulster Hall and the Waterfront Hall; and now another venue is about to open in the city centre - the MAC, or Metropolitan Arts Centre.

Critical, urgent, hard - those are the three words used about the challenge to get the rich to pay more for the arts by the new man at the tiller. He should know. Jonathan Moulds, European President at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is one of the super-successful, super-wealthy financiers to whom the Cameron government is desperately looking to pick up the slack as they cut back public spending. What the government hopes for is modern-day Medicis - arts patrons who use their wealth to back orchestras, performers, theatres and educational projects - and lots of them.

As great changes happen in the British arts economy, what lies ahead for dance? What are the questions to ask about what we will watch in future, what we will create for others to see, what we will perform, what we will pay for?