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.

Marketing Birmingham have a new vid for selling the city. It was put together by Fullrange and, among others, features Birmingham Royal Ballet, Clusta and Made Media

Might this be useful to the folks at the recent The Challenge of Change event? So what sort of small festivals is the city currently lacking?

It’s probably worth seeing this in light of the comments from Neil Rami of Marketing Birmingham that I linked to the other day. When asked which cities have marketed themselves effectively through culture he named Barcelona, Berlin, Glasgow and:

Rotterdam, as they have come from nowhere. They have spent eight years capacity building their ability to host festivals and in that time have gone from something like 8 each year to 109. They saw festivals as a way of building a career for an artist and for telling a story. They now import festivals, poaching them from other cities as well as starting their own.

Topics include the role of the arts (esp independent art) in marketing the city, who Marketing Birmingham markets Birmingham to, what the challenges are and which cities are doing it well.

I’d pull out a quote but I can’t choose one and, besides, going all soundbitey just isn’t becoming of an august publication such as this one.