The days were getting longer, which was probably just as well for Rhubarb Rhubarb, who seemed to doing loads. Birmingham presented its final bid for the City of Culture and we crossed our fingers. Temper filled the streets with fashion icons. We looked at the trailer for Soulboy and discovered the blog for Reuben Colley Fine Arts.

The Arts Council announced a 0.5% cut in funding to RFO’s. Boo. We found some familiar faces in Synth Eastwood’s video tomfoolery from the Flatpack Festival. Treasured at the MAC looked good.

Bright Space started looking for people to get involved in Platform and I asked ‘Does Birmingham Future interest you?‘ and got a fairly resounding ‘Um, who?’. Theatre folk came together and spoke easy, the newly opened Zellig hosted the Bass Festival’s Fight The Power exhibition and there was talk of verbalising and visualisation.

Creative Republic launched Invisible City and Marketing Birmingham released a new promotional video for the city that featured a host of creative talent.

There’s a shindig happening at Fazeley Studios on Friday 29 October. Tickets are free and available here.

Invisible City – Media Circus from Created in Birmingham on Vimeo.

I went along to see:

• what kinds of issues are being discussed
• how the artistic/cultural/wider creative interests of the city are being represented

As far as the issues being discussed are concerned, things seem to still be at an early stage. The main topic of discussion was what we might want a LEP to be responsible for and the responses were fairly wide-ranging. Bear in mind that the deadline for proposals to government is a month away and that other large areas around the country have already come to agreement and are settled and you start to get the picture.

From my position as a lay person in all of this, there seemed to have been two widely held opinions from the business folk in the room – we need to get on and do something fast and the local political infighting needs to stop.

The latter was put rather more strongly by some, but you didn’t sit through a two hour meeting in which that was the only light relief, so I’m keeping the exact phrases to myself. Next week I’m going to go to a nice exhibition or something and report back on that.

As for creative industries representation, a rough headcount revealed six of us – Lee and Rachel from Fullrange, Julia from Aquila, Lorraine from Weave Marketing and Creative Republic, a lady from Toye Kenning & Spencer (I can’t find her name just now) and myself. There may well have been others.

I also clocked Anne O’Meara who deserves a mention. She’s a fantastically experienced property/regeneration lawyer (and my one-time boss, as it goes) who also chairs the CBSO and has been named by Arts & Business as a Midlands Cultural Champion. She was there too and a good reminder that there are some people on the business/financial side of town that are committed to the arts/culture cause too.

First the set-up:

I think this position [that creative industries need handouts] comes from the confusion of thinking that the subsidised Arts sector has much to do with the Creative Industries sector. There’s overlap of course but in Birmingham the two most significant contributors to Creative Industries value have been Architecture (32% of GVA in 2004) and Software (35% of GVA in 2004). Music and Performing Arts are low-value sectors in economic terms (1.1% of GVA in 2004).

And, keeping in mind that 1.1%, here’s the bit that hadn’t occurred before:

Writing in 2006, Calvin Taylor noted that it was:

“significant that the arts lobby mostly uses the creative industry tag. Very few other sector bodies, representing other components of what are taken to be the creative industries, use the tag in their sectors promotion work.”

I pointed this out to Pete Ashton who happened to be sat a couple of desks away at the time and he’s run with it on his own blog:

it’s no surprise to me that the “subsidised Arts sector” are the major cheerleaders for the Creative Industries in the West Midlands given they operate on a financial knife-edge and will grab at every opportunity to raise funds from wherever possible. Meanwhile those who make their income from international deals and multi-million dollar sales don’t feel the need to lobby the local chamber of commerce

Although I wouldn’t go along with that entirely – the arts sector is often chastised for not having a particularly strong/coherent lobbying voice around these parts (that’s partly what Creative Republic was set up to solve) and the games industry have been doing some quite high-profile and temporarily successful lobbying recently, especially around tax breaks. However, I agree with the general thrust and would pick out this bit too:

The other fantastically vague label that everyone’s keen to attach to them at the moment is “digital”

Which ties in with a bugbear of mine – that in some conversations the words ‘creative’ and ‘digital’ seem to have become oddly interchangeable, when they’re really not. It’s just there’s perceived to be funding available for ‘digital stuff’ (often quite useless ‘digital stuff’ at that) so that’s what dominates the phrasing of the conversation.

Oh, and I’ve just seen that D’log has chipped in with some analysis of Dave Harte’s stats. Cor, it’s like the good old days of blogging with comments, discussion and all sorts going on (it’s the same voices speaking up too).

Anyway, this is all a bit heavy and texty. In the next post there will be pictures.

This summer Creative Republic is running a project to help raise awareness of the many creative ideas that happen in Birmingham. To nominate your favourite creative concept, project, event, exhibition, individual or company simply register for free and ‘nominate’. Winning nominations will be included in a book, video and a final event at the end of the summer.

The project is called Invisible City.

I’d heard Creative Republic were gearing up again recently. This is the first peep to be heard from them in a while.

The name of the project is slightly reminiscent of the ‘Birmingham – The Forgotten City’ prints that Smile sold in the CiB Shop (v popular they were too).

This is nice. Creative Review are doing a thing on creative workplaces for their November issue so they asked their readers Where do you work? with the most interesting reponses to be used in the Nov issue.

The Jewellery Quarter-dwelling Life Agency have answered with this.

I have been working with media interaction from an arts marketing perspective for some time, but it is such a fast moving beast you need to say on top of your game. I should imagine that this event will offer something for a seasoned marketing person, but also a complete beginner looking to get some press coverage for their creative endeavours. If anything, it is a chance to visit the stunning Fazeley St Studios in Digbeth.

Speakers include:

• Ian Taylor, Commercial Director and Kurt Jacobs, Head of PR, Marketing Birmingham
• Marverine Cole, Broadcast Journalist Sky News and Austen Duffy, Director FunF Media
• Anna Blackaby, Creative Industries Editor Birmingham Post
• Jon Bounds, Social Media and Web Consultant

The event also incorporates a creative writing workshop led by Clark Baim, Co-Director of Change Point Training to identify, develop and write a piece of news, express your view or highlight a success as relevant to your work.

Strong written content generated from the workshop may, with your permission, then be submitted towards industry and business to business publications by Creative Republic on behalf of you and your organisation. See you there!

Here is a video debrief of the SXSW event – How Bostin was Austin?

It’s an opportunity to get together with other creatives, to share what you’re doing and find out what they’re up to, as well as meeting Creative Republic board members who’d love to know what you want from a membership organisation.

There’s more info on the Creative Republic site.