Robin Simpson
robinosterleyFiled under: comment | Tags: arts, DCMS, excellence, funding, politics, volarts
The post above gives some background to the seminar that DCMS is hosting on June 4th. The purpose of this post is to start a debate about the kinds of discussions that might take place at the seminar.
A few years ago, Francois Matarasso defined quality in the arts in the following way. I hope he doesn’t mind me recycling this material: hopefully he will contribute to this blog if he has changed or refined any of his views:
- Firstly, technical competence. Not brilliance, note, nor virtuosic extravagance, but competence, in other words the ability to translate accurately the creator’s wishes into a performance.
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Secondly, originality. Something about the performance needs to be different from what has gone before.
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Thirdly, ambition. The performers must have a need to improve their performance and to constantly aspire to something better.
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Fourthly, a quality performance requires relevance. It must be something that has a shared meaning with its audience – he sometimes refers to this as resonance.
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And fifthly, which he admits is a bit of a cop-out, he requires “magic” – self-explanatory I guess.
OK these are by no means perfect, but might be a interesting place to start. How can voluntary arts be excellent (we all know it can be) without the degree of technical excellence displayed by professional artists? What does this mean? Is it simply about contextualising artistic activities within their community or is it about something else? Can we have excellent art without technical excellence? If so how? Does technical excellence always mean excellence (not many would subscribe to that one I suspect)? Indeed should we be debating this at all, or simply say that there are enough examples of technical excellence in the voluntary arts for this not to be a problem? These are the issues we want to explore - let’s get the debate going now.
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When considering relevance (or resonance) the idea that quality in the arts is something that has a shared meaning with its audience, brings into focus all the issues around marketing.
Is there a need for the voluntary arts sector to provide an appropriate infrastructure for practitioners to enable them to build links with their audience? For example, communication with audiences, PR, promotion, and other marketing related skills may be needed to ensure successful and sustainable audience participation…
Comment by Tony Gibbs May 14, 2008 @ 3:03 pmI think Tony is right that there is a fairly common need for capacity-building in voluntary arts organisations in relation to marketing - which does seem to link to the ‘resonance’ aspect of quality. But I don’t think this failing is confined to the voluntary arts.
It has been suggested that Francois Matarasso’s definition works better for the performing arts than situations where art is being created rather than ‘translated’. But I do like his emphasis on technical competence rather than brilliance or virtuosic extravagance. In a programme to mark the 30th anniversary of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, the 1990 winner Nicola Loud said recently: “So often people can come onto a stage and perform something that is ‘correct’ - all the notes are there and the rhythm is there - but that’s not what music is all about, I think. It’s about creating a moment in time with yourself and the audience.”
Using the word ‘correct’ helps to make it clear that ‘excellence’ is something beyond doing it technically ‘better’.
Comment by Robin Simpson May 15, 2008 @ 3:52 pm