Tony Hall, the Cultural Olympiad Board’s chairman, completely rejected critical comments in the London Evening Standard by Sir Simon Jenkins, in which the £40 million Cultural Olympiad was derided as "various crazy festivals".

"The Cultural Olympiad has not been 'dropped'," Hall said.

"It will continue to gather momentum towards 2012.

"We are looking for a new title which will better express the great festival of culture which will run alongside the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012.

"All of us want to use 2012 as a showcase for what Britain does so well - we have the best arts and culture in the world."

Jenkins, the former Times editor and a long-time Olympic critic, had suggested that, as pressure mounts for cost-cutting through all public spending, "fringe" activities around 2012 will be the cut.

"The staging of various crazy festivals in 2012 was part of London's pitch to win the Games, though no sane person thought the original pledges would be honoured," wrote Jenkins, apparently unaware that a Cultural Olympiad has been a regular feature alongside Olympic Games for the past century.

Now, Jenkins asserted, Olympic arts projects were disappearing.

"These are vanishing in the night," he wrote.

"The Cultural Olympiad was launched in 2008 by Lord Coe weirdly running up and down inside Tate Britain ‘for art’.

"It was not to be a competition of poetry, art and music, with winners paraded as in ancient Athens.

"Instead the Olympiad was what you always get when the public sector has more money than sense: a mishmash of dotty ideas and celebrity names."


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