Certainly, although I’m not sure what a curator actually does.

My comments on the project’s funding were based on a brief trawl through the Eastside Projects and ESP websites, which seem to suggest (at least if the proliferation of logos of publicly-funded organisations is to be believed) that October could be a month of complete meltdown for any number of these bodies.

I guess it depends on how you define ‘societal benefit’. ESP has supported new projects like An Endless Supply and The Lombard Method as they developed, as well as giving various emerging artists opportunities to show work, and access networks – mostly outside the region – which has helped them to begin to develop their careers.

Eastside Projects is led by artists. We recognised we could use the gallery and its contacts and networks to benefit other people and help them to get a foothold in the world of contemporary art. I guess we figure its a long game. Personally I benefitted a lot from similar projects at an early stage in my career and that support enabled me to get to a point where I am being commissioned and included in public exhibitions and projects in the UK and Internationally. In purely economic terms this means I pay more tax so am effectively paying back that ‘subsidy’. Hopefully the work I make also has some harder to quantify cultural value also.

Dialogue, practical and critical help and peer support can be vital when you are trying to develop as an artist/curator/writer and presumably Rob you would agree that society benefits from having at least some of them around?

Anyone been and fancy reporting back?

Maybe it’s my inner Tory surfacing as I get older, but this looks to me like my taxes being spent for no obvious societal benefit?