For those who don’t know the free tabloid paper, Variant ( http://www.variant.org.uk/ ) their summer issue 2008 published a detailed cultural survey concerning Glasgow, entitled The New Bohemia by Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt. The paper opened-up a can of worms, examining and exposing the people and mechanisms behind a cultural industry set on tourism, festival culture and a move away from the heart and sole of Glaswegian artists’ practice and culture. Here are some highly pertinent quotes taken from the article. Recognise this in Birmingham as well? What are you thoughts? Who are the people responsible for mainstream commercialisation and policing of culture in Birmingham? Please expose, debate and pray tell!
‘As we have seen, Bridget McConnell is fully conversant with the potential of culture and sport to increase the revenue of a city through tourism, and her ambitions for Glasgow…..Emphasis on cultural tourism has led to a ‘festival mentality’, whereby the city’s support is concentrated on attracting temporary tourists than on supporting Glasgow’s creative practitioners directly.’
The concluding paragraph:
More then the sum of its parts, the creation of Culture and Sport Glasgow represents the wholesale takeover of culture by business interests. It posits a strategy for economic regeneration that depends on the whims of elite tourism and its pace of consumption in a period of economic crisis. It demonstrates an ethos that is smothering the city and others like it, regarding culture solely in terms of its value, stripped of any emancipatory potential. Far from being considered in terms of the universal creativity to which every citizen has a right, culture in Glasgow is framed in terms of passive participation and money making potential……It remains to be seen how this approach will affect the creativity of future generations as Glasgow’s cultural communities are rendered impoverished and complicit in the new Bohemia.’
Birmingham and surrounding areas are undervaluing its grassroots communities of practitioners whereby many, if not most, activities are compromised or compromising practitionership for the sake of elite moneymaking art-as-business concerns and this does not exclude many so called art galleries and centres - new and old, that are functioning as disguised closed-shop clubs...Don't believe the veneer of scams and coercion that offers a service of 'helping the city' – or ‘bringing pride into the city’ etc....Many of these who announce this are lining their own cultural financed pockets at the expense and contradictions of what they claim!? Does this sound familiar? What are the Eastside Projects REALLY upto? What are the folks at Creative Republic REALLY up to? Let’s dig a little deeper folks! Please feel free to continue the debate! The time is now!
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7 comments:
"What are the Eastside Projects REALLY upto? What are the folks at Creative Republic REALLY up to? Let’s dig a little deeper folks!"
I guess you could ask them. That might be a start.
I'm going to try and get in to eastside's opening on friday - it seems to have taken ages to open - i will leave some uninvited art.
Eastside Projects already has a goodly collection of logos.
Art gallery as crisp packet. Probably this one like most is ready salted - pre-seasoned.
I shall be searching the space for that blue twist of paper with salt in it
luther blissett
Good idea! I'll email them and ask them what they are REALLY upto (other can as well...more the merrier). I've visited the much invested project website (a few days before the opening I believe) - that has little up at present (do you know that over three years they are getting over £300K of investment from ACE WM and partnership funding alongside?). In actual fact, money aside, I look with much interest with the cultural confidence they bring to the city!? In my opinion you can have as much or as little money as is required when it comes to countercultural activities. I wonder if this project will be one? They have made a great claim to be instilling cultural confidence in Birmingham. Wow..I'll ask them about this too. I will indeed email my questions. Good idea! Thanks.
Well, let's see. Having been involved in a fair bit of counterculture activity over the years I think I can safely say that securing substantial government money to open a large gallery isn't really very counter-cultural. It sounds more to me like it's cultural and therefore something for the counterculture to be, as it were, counter to.
In other words you need this. Without Gavin's work you'd just have Ikon to kick against. Now you've got at least two establishments with more on the way. That can only be a good thing for the counterculture.
What worries me, however, is the level of articulation this particular branch of the age old counterculture tree appears to have. Along with our typewriters and photocopiers we used to have standards back in the day. Maybe I'm just getting old.
Actually, I that that back. There were plenty of screaming paranoid loons around back in the day. God, I remember the zines of closely typed block capital letters. Rose-tinted spectacles of hindsight and all that.
Actually, it doesn't matter how much or how little money you get, it's what you do that matters. As far as Eastside projects go, I'm willing to wait and see, give them a chance and then kick their asses if they don't put their mouths where their money is. Interestingly it seems to be run by the old 'self service' group, who were aptly and not at all ironically named, so I suspect I'd better polish my boots in preperation. Let's keep a watching brief for now.
I'm more concerned with the general way that art and artists have been lumped in with the 'creative' industries, which for me devalues the whole cultural and philosophical aspects of the arts and seems to be all about cash money, which is where I think you guys at BCC (nice acronym - needs a logo, I know where there's one going secondhand)could possibly get the conversation going. Power to your slightly incoherent elbows!
Hiya - I'm back again. I notice that the chair of Creative Republic has posted a bit of a challenge to you Mr/Mrs B on CIB. Are you going to go for it? I'm pretty horrified by Creative Republic, I got involved in the early days of setting it up but pulled out after I saw where it was going. Firstly, what is a purpotedly creative company doing with a lawyer as it's chair, rather than someone with a real creative or cultural background? Secondly why did they get 80K of cultural money (from ACE) for an obviously commercially oriented venture? This is a problemn with Arts Council really, I get sick of seeing artists struggle to find funding when commercial companies such as this get huge chunks of public money that could be better spent on raising the cultural game in the city. Perhaps that's one of the reasons there is little real suppport for grassroots culture in Birmingham and a lot of very corporate projects with a lot of very bland results. As for Creative Republic the only real thing they've achieved over the last two years, other than a lot of self-promotion is the (grudgingly and admittedly excellent) CIB blog. If they were just funded with business money, such as from Business Link, I wouldn't have a problem, but that 80 grand could have helped a lot of struggling artists. (Forgive me if I have the figures wrong - it may well be more by now).
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