D'log :: blogging since 2000

“Why Should We Care About Creativity In the West Midlands?” Wednesday 9th April, 6.30pm‐8pm.

The turnout seemed good (130?), the majority being arts / media professionals of one sort or another, with a great many from the subsidised and admin sectors. I wasn’t taking notes, so the following is all from memory. The ‘5 minute’ (read 15-20 minutes) individual talks were broadly interesting. The room was poor — in that anyone further back than the third row had difficulty actually seeing the speakers, who didn’t stand up and so were mostly hidden behind a mass of heads. The Powerpoint screen was largely irrelevant — it might have been more useful for it to show a feed from a cam pointed at the panel.

Stuart Murphy (first controller of BBC Three) had some tantalising observations on strong and measurable differences in regional taste, drawn from TV research on audiences — but sadly he wasn’t able to say anything about the Midlands on that score. Robert Yates chipped in to mention that the sales of The Observer (it’s a left-liberal national Sunday newspaper, American readers) are now substantially coming only from London and the south east. Murphy also did some amusing rhetorical jigs around commenting on the vice-like grip that the white liberal middle-class has on the arts, to a room 97% of that ilk. Murphy also talked about the wrist-slitting grimness and angst that infests British drama, and a measurable class divide in appreciation of certain types of TV humour.

After the usual comments about the need for more regional funding/support, the panel discussion seemed to become rather mired in national issues of ‘big media arts coverage vs. useless/eccentric local scenes’, ‘what is art?’ ‘the lure of London’ to talent, ’subsidy vs. independence’, and towards the end someone even dipped a toe in the deadly waters of ‘everyone’s creative really’, at which point several people near me started to look at their watches. Oddly, both the panel talks and the panel discussion proceeded entirely as if the internet had not yet been invented — the focus was very much on mass-audience TV, getting newspaper journalists to write gallery reviews, listings in the international art publications, large capital-project galleries, exposure of indie bands on Radio One (via an observation that unsubsidised bands maybe do get a sniff of sideways public subsidy, through being played a few times on national radio), and on hooking into the traditional methods by which a local artist might be chosen to ascend to an art-market heaven awash with rich collectors.

The audience question-time, relatively short though it was, was more interesting because more clearly focussed on Birmingham’s experience (the ‘West Midlands’, named in the event’s billing, being conveniently forgotten). The first question was a criticism of the under-use of the BM&AG Water Hall and Gas Hall galleries, as far as hosting substantial international touring exhibitions (which I vaguely seem to remember was the original promise). There was a suggestion from the panel that these two spaces might be better used as a new contemporary Ikon-like art gallery. No-one was in the room from BM&AG to respond, but someone from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council spoke up. He said that high-quality contemporary art can (and perhaps should) be done anywhere, citing his experience of Intervention (something along the lines of: when he first arrived in the city from Trinidad, “it blew me away to experience this world-class show happening in a row of terraced houses in Handsworth”). Soweto Kinch mentioned that he was set to turn the grotty & gritty space under the Hockley fly-over into a temporary performance space for jazz/urban music this summer. There was a mention of the need for a critical response to art in the city. Gavin Wade (Eastside Projects) said something along the lines of: he wouldn’t know where to start to find serious writers about art in Birmingham, but would welcome contacts.

Someone who I vaguely recognised but-couldn’t-place said (she didn’t have the mike and so I may have misheard) that the Ikon and Walsall New had recently been given £1 million to spend over the next five years on new contemporary acquisitions(?). Matt Price from the panel put this into perspective by putting some flesh on the kind of very serious money that would be needed year-on-year to bring the visual arts in Birmingham up to an international standard. The need for more and better galleries. And, on the likely cost of this being baldly stated, there seemed to be unease among several sections of the audience (performing arts people, I thought, hackles rising at an implied threat to their funding?). There were comments on the need to grow a regional base of informed art collectors. The final question was an observation on the ‘big blandness’ of ArtsFest. Jonnie Turpie managed to get the last word in, suggesting that Birmingham needed to find a way to be perceived among TV programming commissioners as a having a ’specialist niche’ in something, so that when they needed X, Y, or Z, they would automatically think of Birmingham.

Learned in informal chats; there’s a mapping survey of the region’s theatre / performance archives going on, both formal and “boxes stuck up in someone’s loft”.