Are the arts exempt from health and safety regulation?
The arts cover a wide range of different forms of expression presented in an equally wide range of ways and places, so there is no simple answer. The question needs to be considered on a case by case basis. The ‘practice or presentation of the arts’ are allocated to local authorities for enforcement under Schedule 1 of The Health and Safety (Enforcing Authority) Regulations 1998 (UK Government, 1998) but it does not follow that all art is subject to health and safety regulation. What is art? It is not possible to give a succinct definition of art and many eminent philosophers have written extensively on the subject. Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, 1896) wrote a book called What is Art? in which he developed a series of definitions including: ‘The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it’ and ‘It is upon this capacity of man to re
