Sunday 16 December 2012

I’ve been doing funding applications again. Some make more sense than others, but the public ones currently make a big thing of ‘evaluation’. You have to have an ‘evaluation plan’ to demonstrate that you can monitor how your project is doing, or how it went. OK, fair enough. No, wait a minute. It’s the process of evaluation that makes someone an artist, in whatever medium, unless they’re completely crap. Anyone who’s got beyond being a bit rubbish constantly looks at and listens to what they’re doing and asks ‘Is this any good yet?’ ‘How can I make it better?’  Evaluation runs through every aspect of any artistic activity and it’s part of what makes it exciting.

Now, imagine you were on the National Council for the Funding of Coalminers. You’d want to be sure that everyone that you were going to pay to be a coalminer really was a good coalminer. Now how would you do that? Ask them to describe in three pages of A4 just what being a coalminer entails. You know, how does it work? What do you actually do down there? We need to know that you’re really up to this. So just write it all down so that we can understand just what it is that makes you one of those coaldiggers, sorry, miners. That’s the boy. Thanks. It’s OK, we don’t really need the coal, so it doesn’t matter that you’re spending all your time filling out forms rather than mining the stuff. It’s an outdated form of energy anyway, to be honest. Have you tried fracking yet? It’s the very latest thing, we just saw a really exciting presentation about it. Perhaps you could introduce it into your mining practice, that would be innovative.  There’s a funding stream for that.

As Brian Morton pointed out in print a long time ago, there’s only one effective and cost-efficient way to support artists: commission work. Everything else is a distraction. But commissioning requires confidence.

Anyway, I went over to the Glad Café this morning to try out their wee upright piano and it’s rather nice, so I’ll be playing it on Wednesday night with Alasdair. I’d forgotten what night the gig was on, so just as well it was in the Guardian’s roundup of the best of the week really.