With arts organisations, particularly artist-led ones, facing a tricky financial future we are delighted to be given a £5,000 Awards for All Lottery funding to help raise cultural awareness and promote the arts in central Scotland.
This afternoon sees the inaugural meeting of Creative Industries Stirling, getting together of art, design and craft organisations in the area in order to work together for the future benefit of us all.
I will be there representing Forth Valley Open Studios.
Web-site:annshaw.co.uk
Plans are well under way for this years Forth Valley Open Studios and publicity is beginning to kick in.
Our local newspaper, The Stirling Observer, is featuring an artist a week in the run up to the event in June.
I am very aware of the need to tailor press coverage to different platforms. Gone are the days when you could have a scatter- gun approach and send out information to newspapers and hope that some paper with a sympathetic reporter interested in the arts would give your event the oxygen of publicity.
Now it’s the full works using social networks like Facebook and Twitter along with local freesheets.
Once we would have turned our noses up at publicity in these papers but they now have an important role in the community especially as the big morning papers in Scotland – the Herald and Scotsman- rarely give coverage to events such as ours even though we are becoming a major tourist attraction with people booking their holidays around it and it generates over £40,000 per annum to the local economy.
We are now embedded as part of the cultural scene in the central belt of Scotland, and like other events, have to work hard to generate publicity for it.
Because of the shortage of staff on local newspapers it is becoming relatively easy to get arts coverage providing you give them the copy and photos ready to go.
What they don’t like is having to dig the stories out for themselves because they are up against such tight deadlines and very limited, not to mention inexperienced staff, most of whom will never have heard of the concept of Open Studios so it is a steep learning curve and educational exercise for them.
The easier we make their job the more likely we are to get publicity.
The great modernist artist Man Ray, (1890-1976) said you could not imagine what art would be like in 50 years time.
“And even if you saw it,” he said, “you wouldn’t be able to understand it.”
I thought of that when I read this article:
Title: What’s The Great Art Of The Future? Data Visualization
Link: http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2012/04/whats_the_great.shtml
It makes Damien Hirst at the Tate seem old fashioned. It’s just like a retrospective, which of course it is.
This raises the question: what is the purpose of art? If one is to reflect the world around us, a world that is increasingly complex, and to portray issues in a simplified manner that we can not only understand but also appreciate the beauty of our changing environment then that maybe is one very important role for art today.
As we move into what scientists call the “post human” age this will become even more so as technology and biology merge.
What is human? Will not be an easy answer in 50 years time when we have bits of computers embedded in us.
And our art? Will computers be making it?
Glasgow School of Art have introduced a degree in Digital Culture and one of the first tasks for students is to learn to write computing code.
Yesterday the last printed copy of AN dropped through my letterbox.
This is sad and I am really sorry to see its demise in physical form.
However, if the money is going to be diverted to improve the digital version then this is very good news, especially if it means improved navigational tools.
No artist today can afford not to be computer literate.
For culture in the 21st century is all about the blurring of edges between different arts forms and convergence thanks to digital technologies.
What’s more this can all be accessed on mobile devices. Free.
Where does this leave the artist? how do we fit into the new digital cultural landscape that is emerging?
I wish I could see ten years ahead but I suspect that the digital tools we will be using to say something new about the world we live in have yet to be invented.
When I graduated from Glasgow School of Art ten years ago Youtube, Facebook,Twitter did not exist.
So, sad to see the demise of AN in physical form but hello to our Brave New World.
I met fellow artist Amy Marletta today helping with the hanging of the Glasgow schools painting exhibition in Glasgow Art Club.
Amy ran a very successful video performance workshop in the Changing Room gallery, in Stirling some months ago.
But I was in Glasgow Art Club for another reason, to discuss e-publishing with Duncan Lockerbie of Lumphanan Press.
Along with friend and former colleague John Fowler ( ex Arts Editor of The Herald) we are keen to explore e-publishing.
And we are looking for a young enthusiastic publisher who is at home in the digital environment.
We hope we have found that person in Duncan Lockerbie.
Ann Shaw is an artist/writer based in Scotland working in new media. As a journalist she campaigned and wrote about many social and medical issues. She is a feminist and founder member of Falkirk Womens Aid, active in the trades union movement and former member of National Union of Journalists Equality Working Party, and founder member of Forth Valley Open Studios.
