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Movingpictures 12: peace, love and understanding

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I'm away from my desk right now. I thought I'd leave you with this thought.

my shallowness politics

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Movingpictures9: collaboration and cooperation

There seem to be a run of events about collaboration, working together, or other ways of putting this. I'm talking at one tomorrow at Northern Stage which you can also see at various places and, I think, on-line. (Certainly there'll be a twitter stream to follow.) You can read about it here . I don't have time right now to explore the theme in detail, I'll maybe do a wrap up of thoughts from this and last week's LARC event at the RSA. But there is a strand that says collaboration is not always the right thing, and that some things described as collaboration are more like cooperation. The above video may shed some light. For those whose minds work differently, the video below may also help.

RSA cultural contract: straw man dons thinking head

(From @ace_national twitter stream with permission. Thanks to Alison O'Hara for pointing me out!) I promised more on the RSA’s draft contract between government and the arts and cultural sector after the launch debate event this week , so here we go, trying to reflect some of the conversation as I heard it, and some thoughts of my own. Get yourself a brew, it’s not as short as I’d like. (Not enough time!) I guess the first thing to say is that the room was divided on the approach, and few felt it was close to being right as yet. This is understandable, but we were asked by Vikki Heywood, RSA Chair and chair of the Warwick Commission, to vote on a show of hands whether we supported it, yes or no, to which the answer was, I’d guess, 35% Yes, 65% No, certainly no closer than 40:60. The trouble was this was the wrong question – like saying ‘Do you want to publish this first draft, yes or no?’ to which the answer is almost always ‘No.’ Once we got over that surprising clum

Inside Outside Beyond

In 2016 Mary Cloake, Chief Executive of Bluecoat in Liverpool asked me to do some thinking practice about the current and future meaning of artistic leadership. This followed some work with Mary and her team on artistic policy and recruitment. It was a good chance to do some reading and thinking, and to test ideas with the Bluecoat team and some other very sharp minds, and we recently launched the paper at an event in Liverpool to mark Bluecoat’s 300 th birthday. You can now read it here and it will inform roundtables Bluecoat are running across the country over the next few months as part of their Artistic leadership Initiative . It’s not a long paper, and doesn't claim to dig much absolutely new ground. I hope it gives a simple and memorable framework for thinking about, and developing the skills necessary for, artistic leadership in what I call ‘contradictory times’. ( Shitstorms and sunshine being just one discarded title…) I argue the most effective leaders operat

Back to school special

It’s a new year. I’m told that these days by the sounds through my office from the nearby school playground, rather than by my kids needing new shoes, bags, pencils, PE kit, or, in the university years, help with the rent. But I suspect most of us of any age and family situation in the UK always associate the September turn in the weather with a new school year. We might grow nostalgic for that new book, new protractor, fresh start feeling, or we might rejoice not to ever have to go back into a classroom, but there’s some kind of emotional twitch in most of us at this time of year. (I envy the French the word ‘la rentrée’, which sums those mixed emotions up brilliantly somehow, and not just for those in education.) Arts provision in schools is a key area of argument and activity at the moment. Bob & Roberta Smith even stood for parliament against Michael Gove to raise the issue . The changes to the curriculum are making it harder and harder for schools to support arts activi

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