Creative Conversations

Finally one of our publiciy funded arts organisation agreed to speak to me with my trusty recorder!

Thanks to Jack Lewis at the John Hansard Gallery for engaging me in conversations around audiences and contemporary art.

Still looking for others in the South West. I was keen to speak to the Spacex gallery in Exeter, but after hearing nothing for awhile, they’ve now said no.

In putting together my next series of Creative Conversations it has been really interesting who will go on the record and talk to me with my recorder between us. Again I find it is the artists who are happy to share and discuss things, while publicly funded spaces and NPA’s very unlikely to go on record.

I can sort of understand that I’m just an individual with a limited following to my shows. I’m not the BBC or local radio, but still I’d expected them to embrace any interest in what they are up to. If I go to some contemporary art gallery and on a good day I maybe see two other people in the exhibition, should they not be embracing any interested parties who wish to engage with them?

Though I can understand that their curators time is limited, they probably have plenty of more pressing tasks to do than to talk to some random individual like myself.

I have a couple of open questions;

1. Is it unreasonable for me to expect publicly funded bodies, like galleries and NPAs, to go on the record with me?

2. should publicly funded bodies be much more transparent with their evaluations?

i.e. they have to do a report to the arts council, should these reports all be freely available for us to read (maybe they are and I just haven’t found them yet). Or would this openness close down their reports, make them more constrictive.