Posts Tagged ‘ city of culture ’

What ‘culture’ do you do?

Brum is, as you’ll no doubt be aware, is bidding to be UK City of Culture 2013. The final bid has to be in in May and getting a full picture of what culture is for Birmingham is and important part of it. We’ve already had Cliff Richard and heavy metal ballet suggested — but what do people actually get up to? One idea to capture that is to let everyone contribute to a one day celebration of all Birmingham’s cultural activity. For 24 hours from midday on Friday 23rd April to midday on Saturday 24th anyone can blog anything cultural they’re doing on the bid website (it’ll be at http://birminghamculture.org/blog) — you contribute via email. Anything sent to blog@birminghamculture.org will make the site — pictures video or audio included. I think this is the opportunity to show all that stuff that’s going on that doesn’t usually get publicity — culture is a pretty wide thing; are you watching football and singing? In a book club, out doing some parkour? All three at the same time? From the grottiest punk gig to the, er,  soppiest punk gig, it’d be good if someone was there and recording it in some...

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Making it up as we go along

Making it up as we go along

Part of the build up to Brum’s City of Culture bid is the Canvas Birmingham site, where people can either say what culture they enjoy in the city or suggest odd ideas that they’d like to see. No idea is odder than the concept of a week long play version of a Cliff Richards film, but that’s what I wanted. Fierce have produced a ‘fantasy’ festival programme — which features some of the best ideas, including a giant sculpture of Spaghetti made out of spaghetti and art on the buses (go see it all here). And the Cliff Richards play: By the way, if you still haven’t seen the film it’s online here. It did amuse me a lot to see how the Mail couldn’t really cope with the idea of a ‘fantasy’ brochure and think that the ideas are going to happen.

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Guesswork?

I’m quite “for” the idea of Brum being 2013 City of Culture. I’m not convinced that the council have the skills to make it great, and I’m still cynical about the idea that “the possibility” of hosting the “Brit Music Award, MTV music Awards, the BAFTAs, the Stirling Prize, the Turner prize” (all private organisations who can make their own decisions) will result in any of that actually happening — but in any event it’s better to have culture than not. I am interested in the means used to justify it all (when huge cuts are being foisted on the council workforce). Minister for Fun Cllr Mullaney says : “The benefits of winning this award will be enormous and can be summed-up as follows: 1. An estimated boost to the regional economy of £200 million. 2. The creation of thousands of jobs in our growing creative sector.” and so on to where the more esoteric, but obvious, points about raised profile are made. I’ve genuinely no idea how this is calculated, what I do know is that this sort of thing gets printed in the press and is then accepted as fact. I’ve wondered aloud before about how much benefit...

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Danny Smith: Big City Culture

Danny Smith: Big City Culture

I want to talk about Birmingham’s bid for Britain’s City of Culture. Now this shouldn’t be confused for the European City of Culture bid, which if won brings money, tourists and actual prestige, That’s going to the South Hampshire region in 2022 which by then, if Internet idiots are to be believed, we will all be destroyed by an alignment of planets as predicted by the Mayans*. No this is the British city of culture, a knock off basically. So if Birmingham is successful what would we actually win? Well, potentially holding the Brit awards and the Turner prize, although not even that is not definite. And I’m not sure how this would be that even be beneficial. Do we want the Turner prize? Recently it’s turned into an attention grabbing oddity choosing deliberately challenging pieces for the sole reason of angering Sun readers and inciting headlines. And lets face it the art facilities in Birmingham are embarrassingly small, although what we do have is excellent. Including the always interesting Vivid, the young but ever growing Eastside projects, and the only venue really large enough to hold the Turner prize, the Ikon. And the Brits, who watches the Brits...

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A blank canvas

When the ‘City of Culture bid’ was announced, Minister of Fun Martin Mullaney had a list of cultural high spots (it was mostly engineering) and we did too including “Crossroads the Opera” and “Stan’s Cafe’s 24 hour recreation of Take Me High”. But what of your ideas? The Council are asking via website run by Fierce — Canvas Birmingham.

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BiNS is mostly by Jon Bounds a Birmingham based social web consultant, producer and writer., You can hire him to work on your social web campaigns or anything really—he's not fussy. Follow him on twitter or drop him an email.

There's also the odd bit of stuff from Danny Smith.

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