Give us a wage & let us spread the love: a guest blog by @martindaws – £25k a yr for artists not £50m for arts centres

This is a guest blog by Martin Daws.  Martin is a Spoken Word Poet and Community Artist.  Full-time freelance since 1999.  Young People's Laureate for Wales 2013-2016.  Check out his website and follow him on Twitter.

Martin came up with the idea of paying artists to work with communities instead of "investing" millions of pounds in "capital projects" such as arts centres.  We chatted about it back in 2016 a bit and he came up with some figures back then.  My take is similar but different to Martin's.  I favour a simple system based upon replacing infrastructure projects with 10 year funding for community artists based on a scaled system proportionate to the size of each city, town or village.  I recently tweeted this question: "Instead of a £50m art venue, a city could pay 200 artists £25k a year for 10 years to work with communities; do what they want.  What do you think?"  That's sort of my starting point.  Martin has kindly agreed to lay out his first draft in a guest blog to hopefully stimulate more discussion and debate about this brilliantly simple, yet potentially life changing shift in how we think about arts funding and how it is distributed more equitably.  I will respond in a blog post soon...

ORANGE PAINT AND FIBRE GLASS FRIGGIN SHEEP: A conversation about artists & communities & life

This is a transcript of another Twitter conversation between @rattlecans and the poet Martin Daws.  It stemmed from my tweet, which reflected Martin's call for paid artists in place of multi-million pound art centres.  I asked: "Instead of a £50m art venue, a city could pay 200 artists £25k a year for 10 years to work with communities; do what they want.  What do you think?"  This is what happened...

THEY HAVE HEDGES – WE GET FENCES: A conversation about working class childhoods

This is a (slightly edited) transcript of a Twitter conversation which stemmed from the guest blog by @Rattlecans entitled Old Space Taken.  The conversation is about memories of living on council estates and anger at what's happened since...

An open letter to Nicholas Serota, Chair of Arts Council England from artist Richard Parry about arts organisation V22

I received this letter from Richard Parry as a comment to my blog post entitled SHHH, BE QUIET! (Reflective prose about library closures, Arts Council England & middle-class asset stripping.)  Richard has been researching the arts organisation V22 for some time (as have I).  His letter which he has agreed to publish as a blog post here instead of a comment is the result of his research and relates to a number of Freedom of Information requests he has made to Arts Council England.

Old Space Taken – a guest blog by @Rattlecans about a once-strong community, now lost

This is a guest post by @Rattlecans - an outspoken voice on Twitter who I very much respect.  Written in 2012, it's a re-blog from The Ragged University project.  The original can be found here.  Old Space Taken is about a once-strong community, now lost.  Powerful and personal, it's a must read.

SHHH, BE QUIET! (Reflective prose about library closures, Arts Council England & middle-class asset stripping.)

This is my attempt to reflect upon the closure of libraries in the UK under a rainbow cloak of austerity provided by propaganda from the Arts Council England...