Tuesday 14 February 2012: SOTA12
The film What Matters, which artists’ bursary recipients had already previewed the night before, was probably the highlight of the first session in the Lyric Theatre of the grand setting of The Lowry. Kirsty Wark did a great job as chair but speeches by Alan Davey, Liz Forgan and Ed Vaizey were largely unmotivational, frustrating and Valentine-sickly. To have the Minister for Culture, Communications and the Creative Industries stand in front of a large number of arts professionals and tell them he is determined to keep artists at arms-length from the Government was not a good start to the day and threw the integrity of the entire conference into jeopardy. How can “artists shape the world” when they are kept well away from the the policy makers directly affecting the arts? Although Mr Vaizey’s view was not entirely surprising, it did provide the perspective directly from the Minister about how Government view artists. But then why couldn’t Ed Vaizey stay all day? Surely even with a minister’s busy schedule he could have made the commitment to stay and listen to opinions at one of the most significant national arts conference of the year and even engage in conversation with the sector? I think this demonstrates a need for better advocacy work on the need for politicians to listen to artists, and perhaps for an alternative format of ministerial interaction in SOTA13.
The parallel sessions I attended were Artists and Audiences in the morning and Artists and International in the afternoon. I found it difficult to choose which sessions to attend as many if not all were relevant and cross-cutting. When choosing, I didn’t know who the speakers and chairs were which could have helped the decision.
The presentations by the speakers in the Artists and Audiences were both from the performing arts and there were no artist representation on the panel which was disappointing. The presentations in the Artists and International were more relevant and interesting with a local/international artist on the panel. I picked up that the parallel sessions had been designed to unravel the problems of the theme in the morning and address the issues in the afternoon, but I’m not sure both if that was indeed the intention and if that happened at all. Points and questions from the audiences weren’t debated much at all and it felt like a quick-fire, skimming of the surface of the well-rehearsed problems. I thought these sessions would be smaller groups addressing specific issues and working through to solutions in a workshop/roundtable debate so was disappointed that there seemed to be no outcome. To address such big cross-cutting themes in 30 minutes each seems almost pointless. Maybe the conference needed to be longer to allow sufficient time on each theme.
