CalMad
The ferry operator is at it again
Terry Brotherstone
insists the festival director is
doing a good job
Also on this page:
Hugh Kerr
who very much doubts it
Simon Blackwood
Thanks to Catherine Czerkawska and Alison Prince for accurate articles on Creative Scotland (SR 290).
The contents, however, avoid the necessary but impossible question of who decides what is art, what is not and where. But it happens anyway and the ‘where’ part is notably determined by toadies in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
This is reflected in other government bodies in Scotland too – the money men (and women) are in the central belt and the provinces are just the surrounding bits no one ever visits unless they have to. The mystery is that what most people recognise as the main reasons to visit the country are those same ‘provinces’ where, oddly, many practising artists live and work.
So the tick-box genre, which by now should have been recognised as flawed from its detrimental effects on education in schools alone, continually omits one ethnic group to support city-based philosophies and theme-park art.
The provinces don’t get a look in but are the dumping ground for city NIMBYs.
Robert R Calder
Might I suggest that as an act of faith Creative Scotland should be renamed Creepitative Scotland.
Creative Scotland is a sick name for a mere funding body. The Scottish Arts Council, decades ago, had people willing to argue the difference between an Arts Council as then conceived and a ministry of culture which is of course what
Creepitative Scotland really amounts to…
Jill Stephenson
I am amazed that Kenneth Roy (sr 290) ever managed to acquire a logo for £2,000, and, further, that he is surprised that public bodies now pay five-figure sums for a new logo. In fact, public as well as private concerns were paying sums of that order for logos some 20 years ago.
The trendsetter was BT, which reportedly paid a million quid in the 1980s for its ‘Pan the piper’ new logo.
This was at a time when universities were beginning to turn themselves into businesses. I imagine that the impetus for this came from the policies of the Thatcher governments, but some in senior positions in universities grabbed the main chance and became zealous adherents of the (flawed) business model. I can think of a couple of Scottish universities (not my own, at that time) where the principals fell into this category.
The concept of the logo was a curious one, doubtless rooted in business theory. A business or organisation or institution needed – it was said – to have a readily recognisable ‘corporate identity’. The University of Southampton paid a handsome sum for a new logo that showed a black dolphin with its head in a white square and its tail outside the square. Or perhaps it was a white dophin and a black square. At any rate, it looked most odd and certainly did not lead anyone to think when they saw it, ‘Ah! The University of Southampton!’. I recall that this logo was replaced by something more comprehensible some years later.
The University of Edinburgh’s leadership decided that it, too, must have a new and uniform ‘corporate identity’. There was, of course, the university crest, which was readily recognisable. Ah, said the reformers, but there are several different versions of this crest, which give the impression of the university being deep in an identity crisis. What was needed was a uniform and bold statement that impressed on people that it had a strong and unified identity.
The method of doing this that was not tried would have been to offer a modest prize – say, £100 – to a member of staff or a student who could come up with the best result. This quest could have been turned into a competition that might have engaged members of the institution, at very little cost. Instead, the university went down the ‘prestigious’ route and hired an external consultant. I have never seen it denied that the sum alleged to have been paid for the new logo, £25,000 at c.1990 prices, was what it cost. The end result was the university crest in a circle, on a red background. At this time, it had recently been announced that the university’s massive deficit was increasing sharply. So there was much mirth when a very astute administrative secretary pointed out that the new logo showed the university ‘in the red’.
Those who lead businesses, organisations and institutions seem to have a fixation with appearance, at the cost of substance.
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh
