Yesterday, I attended the National Association for Literature Development’s (NALD) annual conference, airily titled ‘The Space Between Us’ . The ‘us’ in this context is writer and reader, with one speaker going so far as to say that ‘audience’ is a degrading term that should be abolished in favour of ‘participant observer’. Whatever.

Wanky terminology aside, NALD did a fine job of assembling some interesting folks with stimulating ideas. Perhaps not surprisingly, the conference was very tech-heavy…as in, if you’re not heavy into tech in some way, you are in the process of missing the proverbial boat where the future of literature is concerned. There were differences of opinion aplenty, which made for lively discussion. Uber-prolific writer-gamer Naomi Alderman offered that technology was yet another way for writers to explore “the possibility space” while Mercy director Nathan Jones worried that a world of writers focused on pimping their work on every available tech and media platform could give rise to the “auteurmaton” (my personal favourite neologism du jour) who is less intent on creating good writing than good marketing.

What everyone agreed on is that no one really knows where the writing and publishing world is going…or if, indeed, there’s a destination at all, as opposed to a confused eternity of rapid, wrenching evolution. Industry veteran Ian Daley probably came closest to the nub of the zeitgeist when he noted that “discovery is the central problem of the book business,” a point surely confirmed by the presentation about Movellas, whose alternative moniker might have been Sticky Noodles; as in, throw enough ideas out there and some are bound to catch interest. 

If no one knows exactly how writers might best reach the ‘participant observers’ they want, it is clear that there are more walls at which to fling our sticky literary noodles than have ever existed before. Writer/coder/maker James Bridle whizzed through a number of fascinating projects that stretch the definition and boundaries of literature, in a great way. Culture and technology pundit Bill Thompson added that “experimenting with non-linearity” was closely linked to the idea that writers and readers “work together to co-create meaning.”

For all the fun and (literally) games, there was little discussion about the potential for the writer, as a ‘live’ presence, to enhance the literary experience: there is so much still to play for here, and that is very exciting for us at The ReAuthoring Project. We absolutely believe that modern technology is an essential part of the 21st century writing and publishing experience…how could it be otherwise? But when it comes to literature, the medium isn’t the message. At least not yet.

– Greg

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I’ve just finished an unusually busy round of work in schools: insets with more than 100 teachers, workshops with more than three times that many students, all in the space of a few weeks. The work was arts-led and creativity-driven, intended to offer students a different perspective on certain subject matter and expose teachers to some processes they might not otherwise have access to.

It’s an interesting time to be working so intensively as an insider/outsider in our education system. I say ‘insider’ because I probably experience a wider variety of schools, both culturally and geographically, than most teachers, which offers a very broad perspective on ‘education’ as it now happens. But on the micro level, I’m always an outsider: as anyone who works in schools knows, each school is its own little universe, distinct in culture and operation, even if linked in its aims to every other school in the country, not to say the world. 

Still, having now finished this recent burst of delivery, I can’t help but feel as though I’ve glimpsed something of the zeitgeist when it comes to publicly-supported education in this time of global austerity. And here’s what sticks. 

 - The teaching profession is harder than its ever been. Longer hours, more paperwork, more targets, bigger classes, fewer resources, more scrutiny. A friend working in finance said recently that he, too, faced these kinds of challenges. Yes, I said, but your paycheque probably involves several more zeroes than that of most teachers, none of whom will receive a fat bonus if they do a great job. The conversation ended there.

- There is nothing as much fun as a group of switched-on, fully engaged, creative teachers. I’ve written books and produced theatre, but I can honestly say that I’ve experienced some of my liveliest, most enjoyable professional moments while playing around with ideas and possibilities with teachers who clearly love their job and like each other. 

- On the flip side of the above, some teachers should not be teaching. If you’re loudly describing children as ‘impossibly thick’, you should leave or be forced to leave. If you’re allowed to say such things openly, amongst staff, perhaps even in earshot of students, your school’s leadership needs to change. Sadly, neither seems to happen very often.

- Strong leadership makes a strong school. A head teacher who gives up his afternoon to help support a student workshop is different from one who cowers in a corner as his staff feels free to openly abuse the practitioner (both scenarios I experienced in recent weeks). Probably obvious, but seeing is believing.

- Government’s various schemes, such as academies and free schools, seem to make not a blind bit of difference to any of the above. Pushing superficial reform while cutting actual resources is even more cynical than rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. It is more like encouraging lower-deck passengers to switch cabins, even as the hatches are spun shut above them as the water floods in below.

- The discipline culture in our schools is worryingly Orwellian. So many children can’t form an independent opinion yet can mach schtum at the merest gesture of their teacher. Where will this lead?

- Teachers are hungry to be more creative in how they teach yet too often have neither enough time nor virtually any structural encouragement to do so. Given this, it’s a wonder that so many teachers are still so very creative and engaged. Thank goodness they are, because they’re the ones keeping the whole creaking, sinking ship from going under altogether.

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An exciting visit yesterday to a potential ReAuthoring venue…any guesses?

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Creativity Quest, Einstein’s Dreams, The Container, Debate London, Culture Detectives, Billboard, Re:bourne, Fourth Plinth, Creative Partnerships (London, Essex, Kent…and most recently, Lithuania and Norway), Space To Learn, The Learning Town Project, ReAuthoring, and Sounds of the Stars.

Looking back on one’s work via project titles creates a strange reality distortion field: some of these projects spanned several years, others were one-offs, and still others are ongoing. By the numbers we won three awards, worked in half a dozen countries, presented/performed at five festivals, and connected with nearly 100 schools. We’ve provided gainful and hopefully enjoyable employment to more than 150 people while managing to not default on loans (since we’ve never had any), ask for a government bail-out, or make headlines by living large on taxpayer-fuelled bonuses.

It’d take too long to list all of the friends and colleagues we’ve made since 2006. But hopefully you know who you are. Nimble Fish would be far less nimble (and way fishier) without your talent, energy and dedication. Here’s to a bright and creative future for all of us, Mayan calendars notwithstanding…

A disclaimer about the title of this post: I’m not ‘anti’ the Frieze Art Fair, which concludes today here in Londontown. I’ve never actually been to Frieze and won’t be going today, although I have any number of friends who seem happy enough to shell out the £27 required to gaze at the latest and supposedly greatest that the contemporary art world has to offer.

But not attending Frieze (or even being particularly interested in it) isn’t the same as escaping it altogether, in much the way that not watching the Premier League isn’t an antidote for being endlessly bombarded with minutiae about Wayne Rooney. Like Mr. Rooney, Frieze somehow leeches into the cultural atmosphere whether we like it or not.

In that spirit, I have not been able to dislodge from my head the most startlingly raw appraisal of Frieze and all that it represents, offered last week on Radio 4′s FrontRow programme by Godfrey Barker. An excerpt:

“The word ‘art’ is bankrupt, and thank god for that. It’s no longer about soul. It’s about money. And Frieze is unmistakably a festival of money.”

I realise that Mr. Barker’s comments are largely reflective of the state of play in the contemporary art world, where cynicism is the raw material for creating art that evokes yet more cynicism (Exhibit A is surely Damien Hirst’s diamond skull.) And it’s not as if artists are just recently waking up to getting rich off their work, as anyone who has visited Rubens’ Antwerp manse can attest. At this year’s Frieze, I gather there’s a yacht that costs one price if you buy it as a yacht and another if you buy it as an artwork. Exactly the same yacht, different price to call it ‘art’…and in doing so to buy in, literally, to more meta-level commentary on the commodification of art itself. 

So what is it that niggles, then? Is it the broad idea that Frieze-as-moneyfest is still considered acceptable, even cool, in a world where extreme wealth is perhaps at its historic zenith as a weapon of mass social destruction? Is it that so much contemporary art feels far more interested in being winkingly clever than conveying actual meaning? Is it the fact that being concerned about such questions, let alone commenting on them, may inevitably come across as naive, laughable or perhaps even contemptible?

There was one happy piece of art news this week, at least for me. The influential magazine ArtReview named Chinese artist Ai Weiwei as the most powerful person in the art world, ahead of buyers, gallery owners and other prominent artists. Ai, who earlier this year was detained by Chinese authorities for nearly three months, said in response that he “doesn’t feel powerful.” And yet by many measures the work he creates–and the fact that he’s brave enough to create it–puts him on the frontline of the tumultuous changes underway in his society…so much so that his own government finds him a serious and ongoing threat.

It was, in fact, the news about Ai and not Frieze itself that gave me the title of this post. Art isn’t bankrupt; art is still, often enough, about soul. It isn’t always about money, and thank god for that.

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first published in ArtsProfessional on 19 September 2011 (www.artsprofessional.co.uk)

Austerity, debt crisis, end of days…whatever. I seem to be positively inundated with job prospects of late. It must be said that these are rather particular prospects, all being opportunities of one sort or another around the business of non-profit fundraising.

In the past four days alone, I’ve received about a dozen fundraising job opps via e-mail from a single head-hunter; the previous week saw about the same number. Throw in a few phone calls (‘Might you be available…?’), note that ArtsPro and ArtsJobs are a-wash in new FR gigs, and the sensible conclusion is that it’s happy days right now for those practicing the dark art of fundraising. (Disclaimer: I was a full-time practitioner of said dark art for more than a decade, but this blog post is in no way intended as an advertisement for future work therein. Faced with the choice of returning to the biz full-time or diving into a vat of battery acid, I’d get my trunks and goggles on. Still, it’s nice to be asked.)

Most of the gigs I’ve seen are for new positions in small to mid-sized organisations, including many dealing in the arts and culture. This is entirely understandable. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has made much noise about “professionalising” the arts, which means finding money elsewhere. This presumably would make it easier for Government to further reduce the current trickle of public arts funding to a barely discernable moistness.

To loosen up those privately held purse strings, Government has deployed a £100m matching fund. There’s also been some modest tinkering with a few philanthropy-relevant tax rules. And now comes the inevitable rush to weapon-up with professionals, the better for organisations to grab all that soon-to-be-free-flowing private cash. If only it were that easy.

Fundraising is mainly the business of building and maintaining relationships. That takes time. Even in this recession/depression the Tyrannosaurs of the UK arts scene will wield their fearsome fundraising machines to good effect. This isn’t because their cultural ‘product’ is inherently better than yours: rather, they’ve painstakingly built strong donor networks and long ago integrated into their daily workings (and budgets) the legions of professional fundraisers needed to turn devotion into dosh. Unfortunately, less experienced organisations often view hiring a full-time fundraiser as akin to recruiting a fiscal alchemist: if you hire them, the money will simply materialise.

There are other ways forward. Fundraising isn’t rocket science; a good consultant can bring meaningful fundraising nous to existing staff. If traditional funding sources are tapped out or locked up—an increasing likelihood—DIY solutions like crowdsourcing may offer a better path to success. And of course, there are cross-organisation partnerships: pooling resources to hire project-based fundraising help could prove cheaper and more effective than going solo.

Sadly, in the current rush to hire full-time fundraisers, there’s a real possibility that dozens of organisations will burn precious resources for little gain. There’s also a broader irony. The time to build a fundraising operation isn’t when things are tough but rather when an organisation is strong. Donors can smell desperation, which is no more appealing in fundraising than it is on a blind date.

Greg Klerkx is Co-director of Nimble Fish (www.nimble-fish.co.uk)

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I enjoyed myself immensely yesterday watching George Osbourne deliver his humanity-free speech to the Conservative Party conference. ‘Twas the usual stuff about keeping investment appeal high and questing tirelessly for the almighty Grail of zero debt. There was, of course, the occasional heartfelt assurance that Boy George and the rest of his Eton chums are “all in this together” with us, which presumably means I can expect a government subsidy soon to enjoy the kind of modest holiday that Osbourne is wont to embark upon.

Osbourne delivered all of this with the smackable smirk of a spoiled child who just got away with stealing his little brother’s lollipop. Nonetheless, I must confess some guilty enjoyment at Osbourne’s lambasting of Ed Miliband’s weirdly Manichean plan to create a kind of moral Star Chamber for businesses. Miliband’s scheme would have Government loftily sifting the ‘good’ businesses from the ‘bad’ businesses; or as the Phlegmatic One put it, “separating the producers from the predators.” Osbourne painted a humourous picture of Miliband “with a copy of the Guardian in one hand and the FT in another,” his ample brow furrowed as he pondered which businesses to smite and which to reward.

The Good Business/Bad Business idea is ridiculous stuff, of course, precisely because its moral centre is so obviously correct as to render it entirely unworkable, even conceptually, in a world where politicians quake at the notion of applying any significant fetters to the global money machine, even as it continues to have its way with us. ‘Moral capitalism’ is an oxymoron: the market is the morality, and thus ever shall it be even as the entire system continues to shake itself apart. Marx must be laughing in his grave.

Ironically, one fall-out of all this happy capitalism is that the UK’s cultural industries are being scrutinised, assessed, rated and measured in a Good/Bad-ish manner that would send the average banker screaming for the door. Given this, I wonder how might we judge who, amongst arts and culture organisations, are the ‘predators’ and who are the ‘producers’? Is a ‘predator’ arts organisation one that hoovers up all the grants in sight by virtue of its popularity and/or well-established product, thereby starving smaller, more interesting art? Are ‘producers’ defined by quantity (as in, bums on seats), quality or efficiency? Is there a fourth standard, consistent with Red Ed’s scheme, wherein ‘producers’ are those who employ local talent?

Then there is the worrying likelihood that many organisations are both predator and producer, at least by Milibandian standards. Those organisations who prove best at attracting audiences and money might also be the ones who job in their ‘art’ (case in point: the National Gallery…all those foreign painters!) and thereby do relatively little to grow the local ‘cultural economy.’

This wide-swinging analogy exercise is just that, of course, but only to a point. In the brave new austerity universe–which looks to be with us for awhile–the organisations who make the most noise or attract the largest audiences are increasingly likely to be the same organisations who get the money and thus survive. The space for smaller organisations, or even for larger ones that toil at the avant-garde, will grow ever smaller. This isn’t government policy but it might well end up being just that: consider David Cameron’s Commons remarks last November when he lauded the Harry Potter films as sterling examples to the UK film industry, which he admonished to make more “films that people want to see.” In the PM’s mind, at least, Harry Potter is Good Art; one shudders to think what he considers to be bad.

The film and publishing industries are increasingly making these kind of draconian assessments, weeding out what is ‘good’–meaning, instantly popular and profit-returning–from what is ‘bad’. And what of theatre, visual art, music, and dance? Despite criticisms, I think the Arts Council surely did its best last year in determining who stayed and who went in the ranks of NPOs/RFOs. But if Government has its way, the Arts Council will be less and less influential in determining the future of the nation’s cultural landscape.

Instead, funding (and influence) will head into the marketplace, which doesn’t tend to have particular tolerance for ambiguity or risk, at least in the artistic sense. There will be Good Arts Organisations and Bad Arts Organisations, based not least on survival, which will prove harder year after year: private philanthropy likes winners and bets on unknowns far more rarely than does the Arts Council. Increasingly, ‘good’ art will be that which is funded and ‘bad’ art that which never sees the light of day.

It would be a stretch too far to say that exciting, dynamic, challenging art would cease to exist in such a scenario. But, sadly, it isn’t a stretch to say that it may well not happen here.

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It’s not often that I find myself in the position of bigging up a major media initiative, particularly when it comes to literature. Even less likely that the major media in question should be the Guardian, whose concept of innovation in literature is typically limited to allowing a spoken word ‘tent’ at its heavily sponsored Hay Festival. But I quite like the recently-launched Guardian-Observer Book Swap…don’t know whose idea it was, but they’ve hit a lot of ReAuthoring buttons. Which of course makes us happy.

The Book Swap officially launched on 16 September, but I’m proud to say that I was inadvertently ahead of the curve. Early last week, I left some books out for charitable collection; coming home from a shop, I found my postman having a peek through the titles. He looked a bit sheepish when I arrived, but I said he was welcome to take what he liked, assuring him that I was merely donating what had been thoroughly read in the household. Checking later, I noted that Chris Cleave’s Little Bee and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore were missing from the charitable pile. Good taste, that postie.

That brief exchange is emblematic of what the Book Swap project is attempting, albeit on a much grander scale. In a nutshell, the G-O has distributed some 15,000 books across…well, it’s not clear where the books are being distributed (one presumes primarily greater London, as this is the G-O’s main territory). The project encourages people to join in and offer their own favourites, leaving them on buses, benches, in cafes, etc. As Laura Barton’s introductory article puts it, the Book Swap is “a wordy treasure hunt, a sort of literary message in a bottle, a chance to toast the extraordinary specialness of books.” Admirably, the Book Swap has promised to range far and wide in its idea of literature: manuals, textbooks, obscure novellas and suchlike are out there waiting, along with Dan Brown and Margaret Atwood.

The Book Swap makes some noise about being an antidote to the increasingly virtualisation of reading, but it actually undermines this point in a good way. Perhaps the most fun aspect of the Book Swap is its integrated use of Twitter and Flickr in an attempt to make the ‘treasure hunt’ aspect of the project more lively. As Barton’s article states, the project encourages participants to “snap it, map it, tweet it.” In this, the Book Swap becomes precisely that: a huge, and hugely distributed, literary flea market (sans trestle tables). And all of it, free.

The Book Swap runs through the end of October. Later today, I’ll be parting with a copy of Lolita and will duly ‘snap and tweet’ its location on the Book Swap site.

–Greg