• What responsibilities would people utilising the spaces have to their community – in return for the community’s support for them, through facilitating subsidised space – in a recession?

  I am thinking particularly in terms of making their work and activities accessible, in every sense of the word.

  There is a sentiment abroad that some rich and famous artists have contributed to the culture of excess that has got us all in this mess. I’m not getting into whether Art with a capital “A” reflects the world or shapes it… the point I’m making is that a lot of people – who at the moment aren’t all that into art galleries and lunchtime cabaret – could come into contact with unique work. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

  However, if this becomes – as just one example that springs to mind – a strategy that ends up hollowing out already weakened parts of cities for cheap gallery space, in an effort to flog yet more spiritual cousins to a diamond encrusted skull, then it would become a wholly counter-productive enterprise.

  Ultimately, artists have to be free to express themselves however they see fit. My point here is that this would be a unique experiment, and everyone – including the people using the free or cheap space – would have to be sensitive to their audience and the community at large, to the times we live in, and use common sense.

  For a decade, creative and artistic pursuits in Britain have more often than not been seen through the prism of tourism, enterprise and “urban regeneration” which is a fine sounding thing but vague and fuzzy when you get down to particulars.

  I think it’s a concept that will be critically tested in the next year or two. Who decides what’s regeneration and what’s not? Is it about creating jobs? Or is it about making people feel good about where they live and work when there’s less money about than before? Who are the credible assessors of that public mood?

  It’s not hard to gauge whether people feel more cheerful than they did – or if they’re putting it on for the camera – any more than it’s hard to deduce whether most people’s mood lifts when the Sun comes out.

  We’ve all earned a break from league tables and national mood indexes. A great deal of this would be about intuition and improvising rather than things you can measure financially or on complicated sets of indices.

Next page…

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7