Temple Bar Cultural Trust made a submission to the European Commission in July in response to the EU Green Paper Unlocking the Potential of the Cultural and Creative Industries. This submission was made on behalf of a ‘cultural coalition’ of over 50 individuals and organisations working in this sector.
Read the submission: Submission by Temple Bar Cultural Trust
We need state support of the arts to nurture ideas, for artists to ‘buy’ much needed time, clear space for ideas to grow.Having been a beneficiary of much support from the Arts Council over the years and thankful for it I recently found myself at a bit of an impasse.
I developed an idea, with its foundation firmly grounded in contemporary art practice , and yet, as it had been adopted by a major Irish Hospital, it attracted the interest of local enterprise boards, Enterprise Ireland and private investors.
In seeking to develop this idea I have had a working relationship that has a foot in the Arts Council and a foot in Enterprise Ireland. However,there is a fundamental conflict in how these two state agencies approach the funding.One encourages profit,the other does not. The CCI sector needs a shift in focus from one of funding dependency to one of ‘philanthro-capitalism.
Read More: Denis Roche’s response
CCIs need to be vocal in responding to this green paper. CCIs need to work with Europe to tackle three issues which come from the questions posed:
Shared knowledge comes through networking, and through networking, new and challenging ideas can come about. An integrated approach, which embraces the educational and lifelong learning sectors, is needed to allow every citizen to use a creative product or to make culture an integrated part of everyday living. Not every citizen is aware of the cultural products available in her/his city, not every child can participate in cultural activities or is taught how to. It is up to the CCIs to create this visibility and to step out from an invisible fragmented sector.
Read More: Ambra Bergamasco’s response
I suggest a rethink of Temple Bar Square to take account of children. The Ark is a world-class cultural facility handicapped by the absence of even temporary outside/attached play facilities, which would enable it to offer unprogrammed activity and thereby increase its user-friendliness.
Even portable play-installations that came out in the morning and were taken in at night would improve the situation. Children and families coming across The Ark need to be engaged immediately for the ethos of the place to take hold of their imaginations and this is currently not able to happen.
An example of good practice is ArtPlay, Melbourne, which is surrounded by a well-designed permanent playground which increases the efficiency of the experience as children, parents, teachers have a place to wait/let off steam before and after events. Some increase in the appeal of TB Square would make a great difference.
More than anything else, I think a physical creative cluster makes for faster development of innovative breakthroughs. There’s a lot to be said for places like Temple Bar in this regard. I’ll never forget walking into potholes on East Essex Street in 1995, wondering what was happening to the place. By the time I started working in Arthouse a year later, I knew the place was sitting on top of an intersection of creativity and small business. The intersection was possible because the place fostered the connections between rough cut ideas, clever people and friendly venues.
We need more of that again.
http://www.insideview.ie/irisheyes/2009/01/remembering-the-catacombs.html
Before they produce content or evolve form, artists offer the presence of other ways of seeing things. It is an integral part of their practice to develop what Joseph Beuys calls ‘new organs of perception’. These alternatives of vision offer movement to a situation, and can stimulate growth and breakthrough i.e. innovation.
An encounter with an artist can have subtle and virtually untrackable consequences. It might provoke, stimulate or catalyse. It may be an isolated but essential moment in a personal or organisational process that occurs over a long period of time, perhaps years long. The encounter can affirm the creativity, individuality, worth and autonomy of a person, and regardless of whether that person’s role in an organisation is deemed to be ‘creative,’ the effect can enhance their efficacy, stimulate their confidence, and support personal and professional development.
The quantification of these spill-over effects is challenging. It might involve indicators that relate more to self-esteem, job satisfaction, or quality of life and experience. Trends in bio-economics have led the way in developing statistical indicators that allow a more holistic picture of an ecology to emerge. It might be more fruitful for corporations, institutions, and nations to develop a self-image, and a means of self-assessment, that understands their organisational selves as ‘ecologies.’ Given the right support structures to allow them to do so, artists are ideally placed to act as negotiators in this important yet delicate phase of innovation.
Read More: Jeffrey Gormly’s response
Develop spaces that encourage disciplines such as computer science, art and design, anthropology, psychology and business to explore jointly new opportunities provided by ICT.
Fostering art and design/business partnerships works best at postgraduate level as students have achieved a sufficient level of real world experience.
Universities should have a role in this by facilitating programmes focusing on Continuing Professional Development .
The establishment of formal links between art and design schools and cultural institutions in addition to the existing school to school links is essential to exploiting the value of cultural diversity.
The development of a formal system for creative partnerships between CCI’s and educational institutions/ business/administrations is essential .The existing approach of workplacement is too piecemeal and underestimates the real difficulty of matching business and educational needs and objectives .
Read More: Response from the School of Art Design and Printing @ DIT
The Research & Development agenda in universities, particularly around creative and cultural products and services needs to be strengthened and commercialized so that we can create scaleable companies that can contend with Google, Microsoft, Apple etc.
State intervention in funding streams and academic insularity needs to be re-thought and R&D should be enterprise-led with real focus on markets .
A curricula for Digital Skills should be enforced and standardized Europe wide (much like ECDL was) to ensure that everyone in Europe has a basic level of digital skills to engage in cultural and creative content online.
Funding for the Creative and Cultural industries must be re-thought.
Creative and cultural content needs to be aimed at the market and informed by the market. Whether this is match funding, venture capital, or incentivising organizations who distribute state funding, we need to create a healthy, self-financing creative and cultural industry that in turn can be potentially levied for supporting non-commercial or risky creative and cultural endeavours. We need to overcome the over-reliance on state-subsidy among the industry.
EU must create a single market for digital content.
EU legislation needed to ensure that “rights clearance” is standardized and that the European market becomes an open, transparent marketplace for the delivery of content services.
Archiving and digitization standards need to be set – in terms of metadata, semantic web ontologies, digital rights management, copyright ownership, watermarking etc. This will help make Europe a global leader in terms of digital content as well as ensure the ease of distribution of the content.
Read More: Neil Leyden’s Response
I suggest you look at how social media is merging online/offline life and how this and communities are the key to the sucess for indep. creative entrepreneurs. http://www.connector.ie
An example of good practice in terms of accessible art work is the altered Images exhibition currently running at IMMA. Goto http://www.alteredimages.ie for more information.