Abstract Art

I wrote an opinion piece in the Art of England (issue 77,  January 2011) on the issue of artistic plagiarism called “On Learning to Steal”. I start by musing on the usefulness of students learning art by copying works in art galleries. You know the story, littered around the floor are art students busily copying, […]

A debate started on the Arts Journal on Leadership/Followership raises a number of challenges for arts groups. In my view, the simple lead/follow dichotomy is not helpful as arts organisations are both repositories of a society’s culture (on behalf of people) and a way to placing before the public new ideas in way that engages […]

No doubt many in the arts community are concerned at rising levels of public sector austerity. For many their very existence depends on public funding of one sort or another. Few, though, will of necessity understand the underlying logic why there are public funding programmes for the arts in the first place, apart from vague […]

Art of England (issue 68, 2010) has published a short piece of mine. It is about the ‘grants welfare state’ and proposes that artists should be funded more as investments, over a few years, leading to artistic and financial success, rather than supported through project grants. I see this as a recurring theme of relevance […]

Some do indeed worship at the alter of the state. Most artists don’t make a living at their art, and most people who study art formally fail to develop their studies into a viable career. Writing in Art of England magazine recently, I observed that we should start viewing artists as entrepreneurs. Of course, what […]