Brilliant brilliant – agree with every word

Thanks for responses. Sorry for slow response…

@Bridget – I think Fun Palaces is one of the greatest and most inspiring examples of this kind of work.

@Zoe – Creative Shops sounds brilliant, will look it up, thanks for sharing.

@Stephen – I replied on twitter, I agree it’s not about colonising – more about sharing ways that different people are doing this stuff.

@Richard – not trying to reject great art – just questioning who gets to say it’s great – and who gets to say it’s art. But totally agree that lots of places without formal (funded) infrastructure actually have some of the most dynamic, and exciting stuff going on and any thing that flattens or devalues that is a bad thing!

The Agency is an inspiring model and I totally agree with your proposals for collaborating with schools. I also think that you’re right about how we can better exploit our expertise for developing ideas, and the vision of a society infused with creativity is surely something that we can all get behind.

But I don’t think this is incompatible with the idea of creating ‘great art’ in the way that your blog seems to reject. An encounter with ‘great art’ is a profound thing. Part of the ‘greatness’ is contained in its encounter with audiences but it doesn’t need to have been created ‘with’ that audience to achieve the kind of transcendent democracy of a shared experience. And yet that experience can have the power to stir someone’s dormant creativity. To draw a crude analogy, the athletic elitism on display at the Olympics inspires millions of people to be more active and at least partly for this reason, it seems to be generally accepted as useful for some organisations to focus on Team GB’s medal count. Ie ‘great sport’. Obviously sport and art hold different values within our society and there is much to be done to address that – and you describe some of the possible strategies – but abandoning a pursuit of ‘greatness’ feels retrograde. Perhaps what you’re arguing for in fact is a radical broadening of ‘greatness’ rather than a complete redefinition?

With that idea in mind, our narrow view of what constitutes cultural engagement can often lead us to overlook the creativity that does in fact exists in areas of ‘low engagement’. I think you actually touch on this, alluding to distinctions between amateur and professional for instance. But then your proposal to use areas with no cultural infrastructure as ideal testing grounds for new approaches, risks missing – or maybe sidelining – what is in fact going on already; from local carnivals and fairs, to customising cars, book clubs to karaoke. Stephen makes pretty much this point above I think. But I think this is a sensitivity to bear in mind rather than a reason for not doing anything.

I don’t want to come across as critical of what you’re proposing here because I love the thrust of it and where you’re coming from – but I think we need to be careful not to disavow artistic excellence as we currently understand it.

I look forward to seeing where this revived direction leads!

Richard

Interesting post.

Quick responses to your three questions:

1. Perhaps it is not the role of existing cultural organisations to attempt “to develop the creative potential of everyone in our communities”? Perhaps that’s actually part of the problem? Perhaps it’s elitist and paternalistic?

2. Why attempt to colonise places with “less cultural infrastructure”? The notion that the intervention/expansion of cultural organisations into such places “will make fabulous places to pursue the ideas I have described” seems exploitative? If these places have a “less dysfunctional cultural infrastructure in place”, why threaten to change it with an imported culture you claim might (unless it changes) be harmful?

3. The organisations you mention may not be as important to the kind of changes you imagine as you assume they are. Perhaps they are reproducing slightly altered versions of the existing local, national and even international cultural (and political) status quo?

Keep fighting the fight!

Best,

Stephen