One of Britain's leading playwrights has said funding cuts could be "a good thing" for the arts because artists would be less "safe and well behaved".
Mark Ravenhill said the performing arts "went astray" in the 1990s when artists pandered to those offering subsidies.
Artists "weren't telling the truth" about the real world often enough when funding was more plentiful, he said.
Ravenhill, who is the Royal Shakespeare Company's writer in residence, spoke at the opening of the Edinburgh Fringe.
In the Fringe's inaugural opening address on Friday, he predicted that theatres and other artforms would experience "increasingly tough times for at least a decade or more".
"But let's look on this as a good thing," he continued. "Didn't the arts become safe and well behaved during the New Labour years? I think they did.
"I think they weren't telling the truth - the dirty, dangerous, hilarious, upsetting, disruptive, noisy, beautiful truth - as often as they should have done.
"Why? Because most artists are decent, liberal, if only everyone were nicer to each other and let's heal it with a hug sort of folk and so voted New Labour."
When Labour came to power in 1997, there was "for a few years a modest but real terms increase in government funding for the arts", he said.
"And we artists were so grateful for that relatively modest bit of attention and money that we changed substantially what and who we were as artists."
End Quote Mark RavenhillMaybe the artist free of any relationship with any public funding body is freest of all? "
Ravenhill is one of the most acclaimed and provocative voices in modern British drama. His plays include Mother Clap's Molly House and The Cut.
He said the arts world became distracted by a focus on urban renewal, corporate sponsorship and social inclusion, rather than reflecting the real world.
"Artists are needed more now than ever before," he told members of the theatre community at the Fringe.
"You're the ones who have the freedom, if you choose to use it, to think of new possibilities, crazy ideas, bold, idealistic, irrational, counterintuitive, disruptive, naughty, angry words and deeds.
"Because these are the only things that can adequately respond to such a huge meltdown in capitalism and the only way that we might find a way forward in to a different future."
He also warned that there was a "real possibility" that the arts could lose all of its public funding over the next decade.
"Would that mean all of the performing arts becoming safer and duller?" he asked.
"Maybe the artist free of any relationship with any public funding body is freest of all? If I didn't have to fill in forms, tick boxes, prove how good, nice, worthy me and my project are to a well meaning gatekeeper, maybe I'd make something better - more truthful, more radical?
"Anything and everything is worth thinking about and questioning."
At this year's Edinburgh Fringe, Ravenhill has co-written a cabaret show titled Tell Me The Truth About Love, which reworks and adds to songs written by WH Auden and Benjamin Britten.
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