Prospects for co-operation between the British Museum and the new Acropolis museum are ‘impossible’ unless the Parthenon Marbles are returned to Greece, says eminent classics professor Anthony Snodgrass.
Professor Snodgrass, emeritus professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University said that a call by British Museum director Neil MacGregor for the Greek and British governments can work together so that the Parthenon sculptures can be seen in China and Africa “is quite impossible to settle without reuniting the sculptures where they belong.”
Professor Snodgrass, who is chairman of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles added,” Only then can the possibilities for the transmission of the sculptures to other countries, whether physical or virtual, be seriously discussed,”
The committee added that a recent poll showed that 94% of respondents wished to see the Marbles returned to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens.
The Welsh Assembly Government has unveiled its first strategy for museums in Wales.
Ministers have agreed that through CyMAL, the Welsh equivalent of the MLA, they will work on four priorities for the development of Wales X museums from 2010 to 2013.
These are: Developing the Visitor Experience, Developing access Developing the collections and Developing sustainable organisations. CyMAL will produce a detailed action plan to cover these areas and align any grant funding available to meet these priorities.
The strategy document which is out for consultation until October 23, identifies a number of goals over the three year period of the strategy including the launch of the online People’s Collection in 2010, encouraging all museums to develop learning strategies, improve accessibility, introduce a new scheme for sharing collections and improve the management and governance of museums, including a new emphasis on workforce development.
The strategy also suggests that museums need to study demographic profiles and understand their communities better and could help raise Wales international profile through loans, exhibitions and the sharing of skills and experience
Welsh Heritage Minister, Alun Ffred Jones, launching the strategy at the opening of an exhibition at Abergavenny Museum, said “It builds on a great deal of important research we have carried out with the museums sector and identifies a clear way forward to improve access to our wonderful museum collections”
The Conservatives have threatened to reverse the decision of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) to move operations to Birmingham.
Conservative culture spokesman Ed Vaizey said that a future Conservative government “will review the decision” if they won the next election.
The move follows fears in the art market that the relocation of the Export Licensing Unit, which grants permission for artworks to be exported, could affect London’s pre-eminent position in the European art market.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, who is president of the British Art Market Federation, led criticism of the move in the House of Lords. He said that the decision went against a pledge by the DCMS in 2005 that the Export Licensing Unit would co-locate with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council somewhere within the capital from 2006? He also questioned why the move to Birmingham was happening before the DCMS and the MLA have introduced an electronic licence application form.
Government spokesman Lord Davies said that pledge related only to 2006. He said the MLA was quite confident that it can meet the same levels of efficiency with the relocation to Birmingham. He added that MLA wanted the art market to pay part of the £750,000 cost of moving to an electronic licensing system. “The Government are not prepared—nor is the board prepared from its budget—to sustain the full costs of going electronic.”
Involving local people in decisions about arts funding should not been seen as a threat to the arts.
That’s the verdict of a report commissioned by Arts Council England into participatory budgeting, where citizens are given the power to decide how a public budget should be allocated is a growing phenomenon in the UK.
The report, by Involve and the Participatory Budgeting Unit said that arts projects fare well in the small-grant, community-focused form of participatory budgeting. The projects most likely to succeed are those that are seen to benefit the community directly, provide value for money, are easy to understand and appeal to voters’ emotional response.
The study adds that this form of budgeting can benefit local arts organisations by increasing funding opportunities, creating more public support and ownership of publicly funded arts and allowing for better informed decision making.
However it adds that the research was based on small scale participatory budgets on community arts projects such as youth drama groups, cross-generational dancing events and music therapy in sheltered accommodation. The report says it is difficult to predict how less community-focused artforms would fare in a public vote, or how the arts sector as a whole would be affected if mainstream local authority budgets were opened up to participatory budgeting, which is the direction government wants local authorities to take by 2012.
The report argues that the Arts Council should support the arts sector to
make the most of the participatory budgeting opportunities and by raising awareness among public officials, citizens and service providers of the social value of the arts.
Tony Hall, Royal Opera House chief executive, has been announced as the new Cultural Olympics tsar, with £16m from the Olympic Lottery Distributor to pay for six of the projects already announced.
Hall will chair a new Cultural Olympiad Board which will have arts sector luminaries such as Nicholas Serota of the Tate, Alan Davey of ACE and Munira Mirza, director of culture for the Mayor of London - the new board is a joint initiative of the Mayor and LOCOG. Jude Kelly, currently chair of culture,ceremonies and education for the Olympics, stands down but will serve on Hall’s board.
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”.
Twenty-six more primary and secondary schools across England are to become “Schools of Creativity”, to spread further the development of creative teaching and learning practices.
They join the 30 announced last October as “the leading edge of a… national creative learning programme”.
“We want to support young people to develop the right skills fit for the 21st century world of work, and to place creativity at the heart of young people’s learning” said culture minister Barbara Follett. “These schools will be at the cutting edge of what can be achieved when schools are supported to be creative, right across the curriculum.”
The programme is part of Creative Partnerships which, since the first round was announced, has become part of the new and independent Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE).
Over the next two years each school will receive £40,000 and an education consultant to help develop and promote creative learning. Some schools will have to restructure timetables to ensure that all lessons provide opportunities for creativity “within a safe risk-taking environment”. Others will develop existing projects such as improving children’s literacy through film-making and using outdoor learning spaces to spark innovation and creativity.
The programme’s task is to help raise educational standards and develop skills in students that employers need, such as the ability to question, make connections, innovate, problem solve and reflect critically.
Paul Collard, chief executive of CCE, said: “Our education system needs to reflect the ever changing society we are in. All young people must leave school with good qualifications and a range of skills designed to equip them for the working world – whatever this may look like in the future. The Schools of Creativity will not only progress with their own journey of transformation but their work will help local schools to develop their practice and influence the national agenda.”
