Where I'm coming from

Welcome to my new blog and thanks for taking the time to read some of the things I’m posting about.

I really hope you’ll find time and inclination to feedback what you think of it (through giving me some lovely stars if you like it!) and sharing your thoughts through posting comments.

I just wanted to say a few words about why I’m writing this blog and what I hope we can get from sharing our ideas.

For the next two years (from September 2009) I am very fortunate to be a NESTA Innovation Fellow on the Clore Leadership Programme. This gives a rare – and much valued – opportunity to take a step back from the day-to-day of my consultancy business and spend time trying new things, meeting new people and undertaking research. I’m only 3 months into the process and already it’s given me lots of new insights and experience – although the list of things I want to do and find out about just keeps growing!

Since I first began work as a curator, I’ve always been fascinated with how artists navigate their professional and artistic careers so the work they make is both interesting and enables them to make a living. More recently – as a management consultant- I’ve been helping arts organisations tackle the same issue, how to create an environment (with staff and funding) which enables artistic work to flourish. It all seems to come back to the question of: how do we balance making art (or making a difference) with making a living?

The fascinating (and infuriating) thing is that there’s no simple solution to this question – and the current massive changes in how we live and work – precipitated not just by the global recession but also by how technology is changing our world – means that the issue has never been more pressing. The old ways of doing things in the cultural world are falling apart – bookshops are closing, newspapers are going out of business rapidly, the music business can’t work out how to cope with downloading. We now spend more on video games than on recorded music and DVDs combined. On the other hand – it’s a world of opportunity – I can now easily make a distribute videos online to thousands of people using YouTube, I can share my photos with the world via Klickr. I can share ideas with fellow cyclists I’ve never met about the best routes for rides in the Pyrenees and where to stay, or how to design a museum interactive with fellow arts professionals across the globe using Ning. It’s all to play for (and a lot of it is online)!

So getting off the soap box for a minute and coming back to my blog – I’m hoping to have some discussions, with people I already know and hopefully some I don’t but who are interested in the same things.

The issues I want to explore are:

• How can we ensure culture is a part of everyone’s life – that it becomes valued as essential to us all, not the cherry on an elitist cake?
• What new business models (including funding and human resources) do we need to survive and thrive in a very different world?
• How could technology help us develop different relationships with audiences, and new business models?
• How can we have a meaningful career, without sacrificing the rest of our lives? Are we better leaders if we are more rounded-people with well-balanced lives?
• How do we need to change – attitudes, models, skills – and how can we help one another to do this?

My background is in Modern and contemporary visual arts and so I’m particularly interested in how these issues relate to my world – but I’m sure many of the potential solutions are common to other artforms and arts organisations in other countries so I’m keen to hear from people with very different experiences and perspectives to my own. And from people in visual arts with very different ideas.

I’m fairly new to this, so please let me know if you can suggest any improvements or if anything isn’t quite right. We’re working on having an RSS feed or weekly newsletter summary so you get automatic updates of new content. If there’s anything else just email me.

Thanks for listening/reading and I look forward to hearing from you!