I popped down to New Art Birmingham‘s ‘Off to Market’ seminar. It was at the old Curzon St. Station building (picture below), which has been opened up for the show. The seminar was a bit of a slog in terms of comfort, but otherwise excellent.

The seminar over-ran in the way that these things do, so the walking tour was a little curtailed. As well as NAB, we managed to see — albeit briefly — Ignite‘s photography show at MADE (a perfectly-pitched ambience, but none of the photographs grabbed me)…

… then Ariston gallery at B’ham Moor St. Station (again a fine space, but the tired video-art / installation / ‘Ikon Gallery circa 1990′-style of work certainly didn’t work for me).

We also walked down to Fused‘s Ltd. Edition, which is absolutely worth making the effort to see after a visit to NAB (it runs until Sunday). If you only see NAB and one other venue, it should be Ltd. Edition.

People at NAB whose work caught my eye: Patrick Semple of South London, making large collaged 2D works and small surreal sculptures; Lincoln-based Joey Holder‘s strange-but-fun paintings that are sort of like organic microscope-slides-meets-creatures; the night photography of Stuart Mills of Birmingham; and the paintings of Londoner Hilary Barry.

I also learned that there’s a seminar for businesses, “A Match Made in Heaven”, in Birmingham on 21st March 07. It’s about how businesses can get the best value of out their arts sponsorships. Actually, respect for business people was a strong sentiment from all the panelists in today’s ‘Off to Market’ seminar; enlightened business people (who are not property speculators) are most certainly our friends — and “Marxist critics” was used as a term of abuse.

Sadly — and “as usual” — tracking down web sites for artists resulted in a blizzard of pointless Flash and annoying pop-ups, numerous broken images and one catastrophic instance of clicking on the “enter” button of a front-page splash page only to get an ISP’s “not found” page (it’s for Catalina Estrada, the Colombian artist whose work adorns the Fused ‘Ltd. Edition Birmingham’ front-page, no less). Artists; please tell web designers who want to sell us sites full of Flash, pop-ups, impenetrable navigation and painfully tiny fonts to bog off, and then triple-check every link and image on the final site that gets delivered.

Incidentally; on the train down from Stoke, it was great to see (since it’s the first time I’ve seen the view in daylight for a long time) that Tipton’s traditional horse-keeping culture certainly hasn’t been stamped out by Sandwell Council. Shaggy horses galore adorned the playing fields and canal-banks of Tipton.