Birmingham: It's Not Shit

Place and chips

The Art of Ideas is a three-day music and art event taking place at the Hippodrome this week, we popped along to the first event – Culture & Identity The Role of Place in Shaping the Arts, as did Pete Ashton.

Catherine O’Flynn, Sam Jacob  (FAT, architecture and design) and  James Yarker from  Stan’s Cafe did a brief talk each, then some discussion – and then a Q&A from the floor.

Cath and James both talked about how Birmingham shaped their art: Catherine’s essay is online at the Post – similar in tone to her talk (and I agree with every word). And James’ talk is on the Stan’s Cafe blog.

The Q&A was the same old nonsense that you’d hear at any event where “birmingham” and “art” are mentioned, it was too much about Birmingham, and not enough about art – I was really looking forward to thoughts about why/how/if art is related to place, but it was all about the Council and marketing and The Arts Council and worrying about diversity/integration and representation (worthy subjects for discussion, but not really on topic).

Guess there’s nothing to stop us thinking about this stuff on our own and I’m sure we will continue to.

Related link: Euphoria (mentioned by Cath, but not so easy to find on the web).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 10:29 am by Jon Bounds and is filed under art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.