Feature preview
The Arts Award started in October 2005 giving an accredited qualification to young people in everything from rock music to photography. As Nick Beach, deputy director of performing and creative arts at Trinity College London, it’s coming of age.
It used to be hard for colleges to take artistic capability seriously, simply because it was difficult to quantify. Now, it is a genuine key to university life for youngsters who might never have thought of it.
And it’s down to the Arts Award.
Launched by ACE four years ago, it is the first accredited award scheme to recognise young people’s development through the arts. More than that, this national qualification for young people aged 11-25, Arts Award supports students to develop as artists and arts leaders, and it’s working.
Arts Award – offered at three levels, bronze, silver and gold – is being used by the Universities of Hertfordshire, Southampton and University of the Arts London to reach young people who might not have considered going on to higher education by giving them a flavour of university life.
“Delivering the Arts Award in a university setting has made a real difference to participants and how they perceive higher education, and knowing they have as much right to participate in university as everyone else” says Ronda Gowland, Arts Award adviser for the John Hansard Gallery at Southampton University.
Ronda’s team has led over 30 young people on intensive supervision and surveillance programmes (ISSP) through their bronze qualification, supporting 16 year-old Carl Morgan, to achieve a gold award earlier this year who is aiming for an art foundation course next academic year.
“I learned that I can express my views through art and that there are lots of things young people can do in the arts” he says Carl. “It helped me to learn to be more focused and think about what I want to do in the future.”
THE OTHER POINT OF VIEWWhat good are prizes in the arts and heritage? Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, believes the best should make a difference
What difference does an award make? The arts have quite a few awards, some of which look in towards the industry, others look out towards audiences.
The museum sector is comparatively short on prizes with the Art Fund Prize (formerly the Gulbenkian) still regarded as the biggest fish in a very small pond. I think awards are great and, if worked properly, can be engines of social change. I must declare an interest. We’ve just launched the Family Friendly Museum Award, supported by the Guardian.
We had a long hard think before we set up the Award. There was one thing we had to get straight from the start – what the Award was for. Was it a simple celebration of good family-friendly practice? If so, who would be celebrating? The winner? The users? The general public? Was it to generate publicity? If so, for and to whom? For us? The winning museum? Our sponsors? Museums in general?
In particular, we wanted to work out how museums might be different, ie better, because of the award. And I don’t just mean the winning or shortlisted museums. All of them. Well, perhaps quite a lot of them may be a more realisable ambition. We wanted our award to make a difference.
I don’t think all award bodies ask these kind if questions and share this aim. Sometimes I wonder if they’ve asked any questions beyond “What will the process of finding a winner be?” and then, later, “Who’s won then?” But if an award is to have any significance for the arts, it must surely influence and drive change. It can’t just be about congratulating someone who is doing it very well already, thank You.
I believe the Family Friendly Museum Award has made a difference. Even the nomination process is an achievement for change. Anyone can nominate any museum – including museums nominating themselves. Taking the Kids in Museums Manifesto as a starting point, many museums use making a nomination as an opportunity for an audit against the Manifesto’s 20 points. So for the hundreds of these kinds of entries, whether they come anywhere near winning or not, a very useful process has already taken place.
Then there’s the judging process. The winner of the award is chosen by families, visiting museums anonymously. We make a huge effort to try and recruit families who have never visited a museum before. Last year, we had some success in this area. So again, before a winner is announced we already have made a difference to a few families, who hopefully will then act as ambassadors to other reluctant visitors.
Of course, I hope there are other benefits, most importantly encouraging museums to put the visitor at the heart of their work. Museums, galleries and historic homes want to win the award – it brings them huge publicity, apart from anything else. So it’s a carrot to encourage them along the road to family friendliness. We can’t be all stick.
And the award doesn’t finish when the winner is announced. That’s the start, not the end, of the process. Winning should, with any well thought out award, be the first step. Ian Forbes, Director of Killhope North of England Lead Mining Museum, the winner of the first Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award, says, “Immediately it felt like validation of our approach to our public. Later it felt like a challenge. Not just that we had something to live up to, but more that we should use the award as a spur to achieve more”.
How can we continue to improve? How can we continue to ensure that what we offer is fresh and relevant to the next generation of museum visitors?’
Kids in Museums was concerned that we weren’t taking full benefit of this follow-up effect. So now, in the fourth year of the award, we’ve established a Winner’s Forum, hoping to keep the momentum of change going, as well spreading the good news. I don’t think the Family Friendly Museum Award is perfect (well, perhaps almost perfect). We change the process every year, searching for the best way to make the biggest impact. But I do believe awards are a simple, effective way of driving change - but only if those giving them have thought through what change they want to achieve, and how an award is going to help them reach that goal.
To make a nomination for the Family Friendly Museum Award, just go to www.kidinsmuseums.org.uk
CultureLabel, the on-line superstore for the cultural sector, was launched this week to start, its founders believe, a revolution in arts enterprise
The notion of a museum shop conjures images of pencil sharpeners shaped like dinosaurs, fridge magnets of Charles Darwin and kits for building Chinese kites. But politics and economics, we are told, are having to be reinvented, and now it’s time for cultural enterprise too.
There is a long-standing equation for the way our cultural institutions are funded, a simple mixed economy structure that many consider is the reason why our arts are in better health than in the United States or Europe, both of which are considered to loaded on either the public or private funding sides. Our funding tends to be split three ways: subsidy, earned income, and sponsorship.
But that equation might be changing, particularly for our museums and galleries, and three young men might be about to shift the balance, with the launch this week of CultureLabel. The museum shop is being taken out of the annexe and in to our living rooms.
“What we’re doing is carving out a new community of cultural shoppers” says 32-year-old Peter Tullin. “Amazon is to books what CultureLabel is to the great artist-designed product cultural intuitions around the world are selling in their own shops. We’re introducing them to the online community.”
CultureLabel is a web shop selling items from, say an Anish Kapoor limited edition print from the Whitechapel Gallery at £4,700 to a 50p toy from the V&A, originally in the China Design Now exhibition.
In between are canvas shopping bags from the Museum of London; gold desktop sculpture from the Tate; a radio-controlled tarantula from the Natural History Museum; Betty Jackson’s Anne Boleyn underpants from the Historic Royal Palaces; a pigeon light from BALTIC; a Donald Hamilton Fraser watch from the Royal Academy; a Shrinking Violet daisy bracelet from the Great North Museum; and from the Saatchi Gallery, what else but dollar-shaped confetti.
It will, Tullin says, not only provide a new income stream for CultureLabel’s partners, it will change the way they set up their commercial operations.
AI ProfileGAVIN HENDERSON, artistic director, Dartington International Summer School
Gavin Henderson is the kind of fatalist to whom things happen, and he allows his life to go accordingly: trumpet player, sculptor, performer, impresario, director, administrator, academic, he has been led into unexpected places to become ubiquitous in the arts in this country. What makes that un-orientated career all the more remarkable is that he has just begun his 25th summer school in the Capability Brown landscape in the Devonshire countryside outside Totnes.
Dartington is a summer playground for serious and not so serious musicians to mingle, learn, experiment, in the grounds of Dartington Hall. New work by both famous and merely enthusiastic composers issues from this five week idyll.
It was begun in the after-ease of the Second World War when the pianist Artur Schnabel, impressed by the fledgling Edinburgh Festival, said, “But where is the teaching?” His pupil William Glock became artistic dirtector, and it was at first set up at Bryanston School in Dorset.
There was mood for rural summer schools. Tanglewood in the United States had been long established, but they started appearing here too, for drama, poetry, painting and eventually music.
Five years later it moved to Dartington, where Leonard Elmhirst and his wife had founded a school and college of arts, and John Amis, as manager, recruited music students to build stages, shift instruments and create posters. They became known as Trogs because they seemed to appear through holes in the ground, and Amis’s old school chum Donald Swann was recruited to organise them. He and his performance partner Michael Flanders were able to try things out there, and their show At the Drop of a Hat was born.
Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia as written for Dartington’s Barn Theatre, but the Elmhirsts were persuaded to allow it to reopen Glyndebourne instead.
Glock continued as artistic director for over 30 years running it alongside being director of the Proms, and it was from his successor, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, that Henderson took over the summer school, an independent company governed by the Dartington Trust.
The appointment, he says, came as a complete shock. “I thought it was a practical joke” he recalls. “I’d never been to Dartington, though I was in awe of its reputation. I drove down the following weekend and just fell in love. He gave up Bracknell but kept Brighton.
“Over my 25 years it has become more and more part of Dartington, so that now where Dartington will say it is the jewel in the crown, the great thing that trust promotes” Henderson says. The summer school kept growing, and developed to embrace dance, including tango and salsa classes, elements of pop music, a jazz class with Keith Tippett and Herbie Flowers’s RockShop. “But fundamentally it’s about composition” Henderson says, “and it’s about a lot of people talking part - in chamber music, to sing in the choir…”
CULTURELABEL RADAR
It is with hope in our hearts and a spring in our step that we bring you this month’s issue of CultureLabel Radar. Last week, Sir Nicholas Serota and Neil MacGregor presented their view of the museum of the future – and from where they’re sitting, the future is pixelated.
According to them, museums of the future will be “multi-media centres” and the relationship to their audiences will be completely transformed. Serota said: “The challenge is, to what extent do we remain authors, and in what sense do we become publishers providing a platform for international conversations? I am certain that in the next ten to 15 years, there will be a limited number of people working in galleries, and more effectively working as commissioning editors working on material online.”
A week to the day later, with almost uncanny timing, we launched our book Intelligent Naivety: The entrepreneurial Museum, which looks at these issues and more: how will new digital technologies impact on our relationships with our consumers? How do we talk to consumers whose first experience of anything now is often online? What are the opportunities for institutions like ours with assets of heritage and meaning in a world looking to de-brand?
We answer these questions and more in our book; better still you can download a free copy from our website www.intelligentnaivety.com from July 20th, but we thought we’d treat you to a few excerpts ahead of that:
Culture institutions know a thing or two about balance. Balancing curation and consumption, intellect and accessibility, heritage and modernity, today’s market and tomorrow’s study, preparation and performance, intrinsic and instrumental, public and private, commercial and creative, perfection and delivery.
Liverpool was so successful as last year’s European Capital of Culture that the government wants to have cities of culture around the country. But, as Andrew Tait reports, a small and ancient Wessex community is celebrating its own status
Carried along on a wave of enthusiasm from local artists, businesses and shopkeepers, the market town of Marlborough, Wiltshire (charter 1204), is rapidly turning itself into a regional centre for the arts.
Marlborough, with a cultural catchment area from Devizes to the west and Newbury, across the border in Berkshire, to the east, has a periphery of villages where scores of artists and craftsmen have established their studios and thriving businesses over recent years.
As music from the annual Marlborough jazz festival throbbed through the streets, parks and pubs last weekend, visitors and residents were invited to follow the Marlborough arts trail, a month long project which features the work of 59 local artists in 30 office and shop windows, with a free art trail handout with a map showing who can be seen where.
Also during every weekend in July some 40 artists – painters, ceramicists, photographers, printmakers and sculptors – are opening their studios in and around Marlborough to the public to discuss, demonstrate and sell their work. Some are offering courses and workshops.
Last Sunday, coinciding with Marlborough’s annual jazz weekend, an inaugural art market was held in a car park in The Parade (also August 16 and September 13, 10am-4pm), near the site of a projected cinema and arts centre on the banks of the River Kennet.
Chainsaw sculptures, hand-made artisan jewellery, paintings, photography and ceramics were on sale, to the accompaniment of performances by children from a community primary school, clowns and local musicians.
The first Marlborough arts month was held in 2008, organised by the We Love Marlborough initiative, which was born the year before over a gathering in a local pub. “Some of us who care about Marlborough as our special town and about the arts decided to tap into the wealth of local talent and the goodwill of local traders and businesses,” says Louisa Davison, a PR professional who, together with husband Peter, president of the Chamber of Commerce, regards the work for We Love Marlborough as a labour of love itself.
But she stresses that the July Marlborough arts trail and studio visits are far from the only activities she and her colleagues, many of them artists and including a stiltwalker, organise throughout the year, from concerts, street entertainment surrounding the switching on of the Christmas lights and exhibitions – all not-for-profit.
Also involved in many of the projects, and with a programme of its own, is the Kennet Valley Arts Trust (KVAT), driving force behind the proposed riverside complex.
This is the Riverbank arts centre, long the ambition of the KVAT to provide theatre, visual arts and cinemas facilities which the trust is in discussions over with the new Wiltshire unitary authority.
This weekend also saw the opening in the offices of local businessman Tony Apps of a display of work by Jack (The Singing Butler) Vettriano and local artists Davina Fisher, Chantal Bourgonje and Ray Ward.
Already established as permanent showcase for local creativity is the “redundant” church of St. Peter and St. Paul at the end of the High Street, where Cardinal Wolsey was ordained in 1498.
The church, now an arts and craft centre with craft shops and stalls and a café, is a welcome haven for Marlborough visitors, many of them en route to nearby Avebury and Stonehenge. For residents it regularly presents lectures, concerts and exhibitions and, yes, church services.
The town’s traders are fully behind We Love Marlborough, and this latest initiative. The art trail is sponsored by Equilibrium Wealth Management Ltd and Waitrose - who are both exhibiting art work – and, unsurprisingly, by the local Chamber of Commerce.
“In these tough economic times traders are open to new ideas that will attract people to the town, entice them to look in shop windows and spend money with our local traders,” says Peter Davison. “We think the art trail is a brilliant idea and are delighted to be co-sponsoring the event.”
Further information: www.welovemarlborough.co.uk
The German conceptual artist is the subject of the latest Artist Rooms exhibition, this time at the seaside De La Warr Pavilion. Simon Tait reports.
The tax driver isn’t impressed by Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion. “Looks all right from the beach, but the backside that faces the town looks like a car showrooms. Hate it. And it’s all for the arty people, nothing for the locals as it was meant to be”.
He probably won’t feel any more positive about the new exhibition at the De La Warr, but the arty people will like it. If it comes off, a few more besides, and maybe one or two locals.
In fact, despite its avant garde nature, the De La Warr’s director Alan Haydon thinks Bexhill will love it.
The exhibition title, Beuys is Here, reflects the surprise of the choice of location for such art for some, but it’s the De La Warr’s choice from the Artist Rooms tour. This is the extraordinary series of work by key modern and contemporary artists collected by the dealer Anthony D’Offay and donated to the nation via the Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, half way through this first year’s journeying, for which key galleries around the country make bids with their proposals which D’Offay himself vets. Among the showings already, Wolverhampton and Walsall have had Warhol, Glasgow has had Bruce Nauman, Middlesbrough Gerhard Richter, Cardiff Diane Arbus, and Inverness Robert Mapplethorpe. Tate has had a huge bite with LeWitt in Liverpool, Gilbert & George at Millbank, Anselm Kiefer/Ed Ruscha and others at Bankside and Lawrence Weiner at St Ives.
But this is the one Haydon wanted: Joseph Beuys, the sculptor, painter, conceptualist, performance artist, humanist, theorist and social philosopher who died in 1986.
“It’s a great opportunity, particularly in a building founded upon socialist principles and cultural democracy, so where better to begin with Beuys than here” he said. “And we particularly wanted to test the sense of Joseph Beuys the artist, the man, and some of the issues that he was trying to confront during his lifetime, and where that is today, testing it with new generations of audiences, new generations of artists some of whom didn’t have the fortunate opportunity that I did as a young artist to meet him and be quite heavily influenced by him. The great thing for us is just to bring it out of the metropolis into a relatively small town and see it in a different setting.”
AI ProfileRosy Greenlees, executive director of the Crafts Council
Two recent items in newspapers gave Rosy Greenlees the opportunity to underline the importance of the crafts and the Crafts Council. One was a news story that said surgeons are no longer leaving medical school with the “haptic” skills – manipulative dexterity - they used to; the other was by a critic writing about architecture who wrote that “visual artists fought for centuries to define themselves as more than mere craftsmen”.
Between them, they serve to define where the crafts are in the 21st century. One reason given for apparently cack-handed surgeons is that they used to be taught craft at school – not simply sewing but moving different materials around to serve a new purpose or an old one better – and our children are not being taught the crafts at school that provide those haptic skills. “It seems to me there’s a much broader value around that engagement” says the executive director of the council. “Engagement in tangible materials and skills is central”.
The remark by the critic, Jonathan Jones of The Guardian, reflects a long-standing misconception about the creative hierarchy, with visual art standing way above the handicrafts, and craftspeople striving to be promoted to recognition as artists. “If an artist does something which is craft it’s called art” she says. “If a maker does something original they’re criticised for trying to aspire to be artists. I’m not saying craft is art, it’s different, they’re apples and pears, one is not superior to the other.”
And these are two key messages she has made it her mission to get across as the Crafts Council moves on as the national development agency for the contemporary crafts in the UK, with a key new document, the Craft Blueprint, created by a Crafts Skills Advisory Panel she chaired and published jointly by the Crafts Council and Creative & Cultural Skills.
The report calls for more diverse entry into the craft professions, and education in craft at all levels, with new apprenticeship provision, and a review of craft qualifications. It wants to enhance leadership, professional development and business support in a sector which has been seen to be fragmented. And the report calls for more alliances among craft, visual arts and other relevant organisations. In her forward, Greenlees says the sector needs the skills to reach new markets born of globalisation, fragmentation and new consumer trends. “It needs to further capitalise on developing digital cultures to create new types of craft production and consumption”.
Critic Sebastian Scotney examines ten years of the BBC New Generation Artists Scheme
With the benefit of hindsight, the list of artists chosen in 1999 to be the first intake of BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists now makes very impressive reading: it includes the Belcea String Quartet, cellists Natalie Clein and Alban Gerhardt, pianists Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne, and singers Christopher Maltman and Lisa Milne.
Several major careers have emerged from subsequent cohorts too, such as those of trumpeter Alison Balsom and violinist Janine Jansen. But whereas it is the artists themselves who rightly make the waves, BBC Radio 3, National Radio Station of the Year, will also be marking the success of the scheme with a three-day mini-festival within the Proms, 12 daytime concerts at Cadogan Hall. They won’t make the biggest splash of the 2009 season, but they will mark ten years of very worthwhile work.
The prime mover behind the NGA scheme since inception has been Adam Gatehouse, Editor of Live Music at Radio 3. His portfolio of responsibilities also includes lunchtime concerts in various venues nationwide, together with afternoon and through-the-night broadcasting. NGA constitutes roughly a third of his job, he says.
The Wedgewood Museum in the Potteries has won the £100,000 Arts Fund Prize for Museums and Galleries for 2009, in a difficult year for the Wedgewood name
If winning the Art Fund Prize for Museum and Galleries has done else, it has the world know that the winner is open and welcoming visitors, because the shock news that exploded in January led many to believe that it wasn’t.
But the Waterford Wedgewood company that went into administration in January had nothing but a family link to the new Wedgewood Museum which opened next to the works at Barlaston in the Potteries in October, and as you now know is not only open but thriving.
And the £100,000 prize money will go towards more development, kick-starting the effort to raise the £2m needed to create a temporary exhibition space within the new building.
“It’s got us national and international coverage which is very upbeat, and we’re delighted” said the museum’s director, Gaye Blake Roberts. Not only was it the choice of the judges, led by Lord Puttnam, but also of the overwhelming majority of the 27,000 who votes on the Guardian’s website. It beat Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, for its Centre of New Enlightenment; Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham; and Ruthin Craft Centre in North Wales.
“This museum is extraordinary for so many reasons, and we were all but unanimous in our decision” Puttnam, said at the presentation at the RIBA gallery. “The Wedgwood Museum brilliantly highlights the marriage of art, design, manufacturing and commerce; a marriage that resonates more today than at possibly any time in the intervening years. In every respect it fully meets our criteria of what a 21st century museum should aspire to be.”
