Tag Archive for 'Charles Leadbeater'

Adrian Olsen, Retired member of CILIP and former Head of Libraries and Lifelong Learning, London Borough of Southwark

Published on December 3, 2009 in Consultations. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

There is talk of a crisis in public libraries (although from the inside of a Discovery Centre or Idea Store it is perhaps harder to see what this crisis is), and the all-party parliamentary review originated by Lyn Brown MP recently proposed a National Development Agency as a possible solution to the need for national leadership. I would wholly support this idea but it is, of course, not new. It was first suggested by Charles Leadbeater and Demos in the April 2003 report “Overdue – how to create a modern public library service”, commissioned by the Laser Foundation and launched at a seminar in July 2003.The report is well worth reading or re-reading for a trenchant analysis of our current situation and potential solutions.

It is time to end the situation whereby individual local authorities just do their own thing (some well, some badly, some plain mediocre), with MLA/DCMS exhorting them from the sidelines (but exhorting them to do what?) and trying to tackle every problem with a bureaucratic tangle and another form to fill in. Also, DCMS does not have the vital control of the purse strings which would enable it to have real influence and, for example, practical enforcement of the Public Libraries and Museums Act. At the moment, the impact of the public library service, as a national “force”, is less than the sum of its parts, and this has to change. It is not fundamentally the fault of local authorities, individually or collectively, or indeed of MLA/DCMS and their staff – they do what they are enabled to do; rather it is a national structural failure, of organisation and budget responsibility, as Leadbeater pointed out in his report. Moving around the deck-chairs within MLA, etc will not change anything!

I think most practising librarians would probably agree that the only successful thing that MLA has done (i.e. with a real outcome and impact) is the People’s Network – a national initiative, with mainly national funding but delivered locally. The Reading Agency’s Summer Reading Challenge is a similar success story where a national initiative is implemented locally, with significant cost savings. The former had largely central funding whereas the latter doesn’t, but both are successful in doing something real and practical, out there with the public, and getting the best of both worlds – national co-ordination, efficiency, publicity, profile, etc but with a strong local character. Both are examples of how a National Development Agency could work where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Any review should run as fast as it can from the red-tape solutions that are likely to fudge the real issues, and show real blue-sky thinking by defining a vision for a national public library service with a strong local face and by concentrating on converting the public libraries element of MLA, and its inward-looking bureaucratic and peripheral role, into a National Development Agency to implement the vision.

Its brief should be to define, enable and enforce a high quality national public library service but also to do “real” things for the service, on the model of the

People’s Network/Summer Reading Challenge; its remit

should be robust in terms of the Public Libraries and Museums Act, but also carefully balanced between national initiatives and control and local needs and implementation. It would not run the public library service but lead it. And, of course, it should have a proper budget – “golden teeth” perhaps?

The creation of such an organisation is the only way to provide the national leadership that is now so lacking. Of course, there is the question of potential tensions between national and local agendas and budgets, but the two models I have given above are practical examples of fruitful co-operation between the national and the local and I am not aware that they have caused too much friction. And frankly I don’t think the national infrastructure could be much worse than it is now. With a high-profile, dynamic head (please not a Tzar!) – a leading author or “sensible” media person perhaps – and a mandate for excellence and real, direct improvements, a National Development Agency could transform the lack-lustre national image that the public library service currently has (even if not wholly justified) but without trampling on or destroying its local identity.

The above is a slightly edited version of a letter published in CILIP Update in December 2008.

The Art of With

Published on October 8, 2009 in Essays. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

“L’état, c’est moi.” Louis XIV
“I am the Met, and the Met is me.” Philippe de Montebello, recently retired director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In his wide-ranging essay The Art of With, Charles Leadbeater argues that the Web has introduced a new system of many-to-many communication that is re-shaping the cultural landscape.

Leadbeater describes the previous cultural paradigm as a “to and for” model. He connects this “to and for” logic to mass media, in which cultural products – albums, films, books, newspapers – are endlessly reproduced and distributed to a large number of consumers. 1 The human subject is basically de-humanised, treated as a consumer, a problem, a number, rather than “bundles of capabilities and potential.”

The Web has altered the logic of the age of mass communication; now, audiences often produce and distribute their own content and millions of cultural producers share their work on countless online channels. To use Leadbeater’s formulation, the cultural sector no longer can simply deliver content “to and for” audiences; it must try to harness the creative and conversational power of its audiences, embracing a new collaborative paradigm: “the principle of With.”

In art, Leadbeater connects “to and for” to the increasing specialisation of the art world. Drawing heavily Grant Kester’s scathing treatment of the contemporary art world in Conversation Pieces, Leadbeater suggests that the art world celebrates artworks that are difficult to decode. The most celebrated contemporary art is therefore accessible only to specialists and insiders.

Leadbeater issues a call to action for arts organisations to embrace more participatory models and re-invent themselves for the Age of With: “…the web’s potential to change how we make and experience culture will be fully opened up only if we go further.” This is his challenge – radical in spirit, sparklingly nebulous, and almost entirely unencumbered by actual example.

In this essay, I will consider why and how art institutions might embrace Leadbeater’s concept of the Art of With. In doing so, I will focus on the role of institutions as cultural gatekeepers – a role that offers particularly interesting opportunities and challenges in the age of participatory media.

1. He also connects it to the tradition of large-scale public services that emerged in the UK after World War II when wartime bureaucracy reinvented itself as civil service.

Why is Cornerhouse interested in We-think?

Published on April 29, 2009 in Blog. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

A guest post from Dave Moutrey, Director and CEO of Cornerhouse, Manchester.

How should a contemporary arts organisation work with audiences, artists and curators in this early part of the 21st Century at a time when;

  • the boundaries between consumer and producer are becoming increasingly blurred, in a world of infinite communication possibilities,
  • where people are increasingly collaborating to create and innovate,
  • where many artists are working with the grain of these changes,
  • where new business models are developing with these approaches and embedded within them.

This is a question that Cornerhouse is investigating over the next few years because it is our view that as a contemporary arts centre, Cornerhouse cannot sit outside of such dynamic changes but must embrace and work with them. Our view is that we need to transform the organisation into a place that brings together artists and audiences to exchange ideas and help make sense of the world through ‘open’ systems, innovation and business models. In short ‘We-think’.

Taking an open approach to developing a programme for a contemporary arts centre we believe is untried. Cornerhouse is changing to an approach which involves significant dialogue between the curator, artists and audiences. Can high quality exhibitions, film seasons and cross art form events be created using wikis? How does this affect curatorial practice? What does this do to existing business models? What does a Web 2.0 arts centre look like? Is it all just ‘emperor’s new clothes’. We will find out.

We have embarked on a research programme to understand more about what we mean by ‘open’. Charles Leadbeater was commissioned to write a think piece on ‘open’ and the contemporary arts which we now want to use as a provocation for further thinking, writing and debate. His excellence thought provoking essay, The Art of With, is an important starting point for the next part of the debate. In particular we are interested in understanding more about the challenges and opportunities we face in developing new practice rooted in this thinking.

This is only the beginning. We need to take our programme to a new place, which is a really scary part as if we are being open, it is hard to say exactly what it will look like. Where we end up on a scale that has ‘curated’ at one end and ‘democratic’ at the other will have a major impact on how we shape our programme and the nature of the dialogue with audiences and artists. How do we preserve our brand as we go move in the direction of we think?

Given our commitment to developing an open approach it would be perverse if this happened behind closed doors with a few industry ‘experts’ and ‘consultants’ so we are not doing that. We are asking for views and opinions from anyone who wants to engage with the ideas and we will share them with people who are interested in being part of the conversation. We already know that other arts organisations are interested in what we are trying to do. We hope our audiences will also be interested to engage with the debate. Please engage and share with The Art of With.

Boulders and Pebbles

Published on April 22, 2009 in Essays. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Twenty years ago the industries that provided most of our information, entertainment and culture resembled a few very large boulders strewn over an empty beach. These boulders were the big media companies that came into being because media had high fixed costs – print plants for newspapers and studios for television. They were closely regulated and the resources they used, like broadcast spectrum, were scarce. All that created high barriers to entry. These boulders made their money mainly from advertising and by charging consumers for access to their products, which required controlled access and often physical distribution and storage. The public cultural sector had its own equivalents of the boulders, built on scarcity of resources and access. The BBC, the British Library, the national museums, great professional storehouses of culture and knowledge, are public sector boulders.24

Anyone trying to set up a significant new media or cultural business could be seen coming from a long way off. Rolling a new boulder onto the beach took lots of people, money and heavy machinery. In the mid-1980s an entrepreneur called Eddie Shah tried to roll a boulder onto the British beach by setting up a national newspaper based in northern England. That provoked a protracted national strike. In the 1990s lottery funding allows the creation of a new generation of cultural boulders, many of them very attractive and successful. Some – the Sage in Gateshead – had more open operating philosophies than their older brethren. Others simply seemed to put the same cultural experiences in more attractive buildings. Until very recently boulders, both old and new, were the only business in town.

Now imagine the scene on this beach in five years time. A few very big boulders will be still showing. But many will have been drowned by a rising tide of pebbles. Every minute millions of people come to the beach to drop their own little pebble: a blog post, a YouTube video, a picture on Flickr, an update on Twitter. A bewildering array of pebbles in different sizes, shapes and colours are being laid down the whole time, in no particular order, as people feel like it.25

This dangerously simplified division of the world into boulders and pebbles means there will be three kinds of media and cultural businesses in future.

All the new media and cultural organizations, created from now on, will be pebble businesses. Google and other more intelligent search engines offer to help us find just the pebble we are looking for. Google will increasingly offer to organize more and more of the unruly beach. Wikipedia is a vast collection of factual pebbles. YouTube is a collection of video pebbles; Flickr of photographic pebbles. Social networking sites such as Facebook allow us to connect with pebbles who are friends. Twitter, the micro blogging, service allows people to create collections of lots of really tiny little pebbles. Most cultural entrepreneurs seeking to set up a creative new business in future will start among the pebbles and aim to spread.26

There will still be lots of activity in the boulder business. Many of the boulders will have to merge and cut costs to withstand the onslaught of the pebbles. Channel 4 might merge with the BBC Worldwide. The regional newspaper industry is already lobbying to make it easier for mergers arguing it is the only way to stave off the industry’s collapse. The national newspaper industry is cutting jobs. The cultural sector may well face similar pressures, to merge to cut costs. Only the big will really do well in this game.

The main growth area, however, for the cultural sector, will be in hybrids: boulders that find ways to work with the pebbles or pebble that grow to be boulders. Barack Obama made it to the White House thanks to a campaign which took organizing the pebbles to new heights. Obama’s web based campaign rewrote the rules on how to reach voters, raise money, organise supporters, manage the media and wage political attacks. Obama is now a boulder that speaks pebble. There are huge opportunities to create more hybrids like this, as large institutions seek to engage with their communities in new ways and self-organising communities go in the other direction, acquiring scale. A prime example is the way the British Library is trying to keep up with the online revolution going on around it. Many public institutions – the BBC, the NHS - are now entering this space. The web could allow us, at quite low cost, to create an entire new generation of public service media organisations simply by encouraging publicly funded museums and galleries to become multi-media, running their own television channels over the web or finding new ways to engage audiences to become collaborators and contributors.

Those are the strategic choices facing all cultural and media organizations, including those in the publicly funded sector. Start from scratch with the pebbles. Build a bigger, stronger boulder. Build a hybrid that is a mix of boulder and pebble.

Many arts organisations will want to see themselves in the middle ground: retaining their boulder status but finding interesting ways to interact with the pebbles. Most of these will see this task of interacting with the pebbles as mainly about marshalling the web and digital technology to allow them to do the job they already do a bit better: online booking; seeing preview video clips; blogging; building a social media profile; creating new ways for customers to interact with their institution.

None of that is easy nor to be dismissed lightly. Using web technology well to interact with audiences takes time, persistence, money, imagination and skill. However the web’s potential to change how we make and experience culture will be fully opened up only if we go further.

It would be naive for an arts organisation to endorse a shift towards collaboration and participation as always and essentially good. It depends how it is done, on what terms, in whose interests. As the web spreads it will slowly yet thoroughly change our sense of ourselves: how we experience and create culture; how we get ourselves organised and get jobs done; how we make decisions and find knowledge. Arts organisations should critically and creatively engage with this culture, exploring, probing, questioning, challenging it, opening up possibilities within it that commerce will not entertain, provoking people to see it in different lights and ways. In the process artists and the communities they engage will open up new ways of seeing an emergent mass culture which will be as saturated with the idea of collaboration as industrial culture is with the idea of consumption. Many are already exploring this space. Martin Creed’s Work 850 at Tate Britain had members of the public sprinting through the gallery, weaving their way between visitors. Janet Frere’s work Return of the Soul was created with thousands of Palestinian refugees making tiny clay figures. Anthony Gormley is experimenting with structured mass participation in One & Another, his plan to create a living monument on the 4th Plinth in Trafalgar Square, with a cast of 2,400 members of the public occupying the plinth for an hour each over 100 days. Mass participation is a theme in Olafur Eliason’s work such as the Weather Project in Tate Modern in 2003 and has figured in the work of Art Angel, for example, through the mass reconstruction of the siege of Orgreave during the miner’s strike.

If artists can work in the right way to work with these communities they will find new, more collaborative and participatory ways, to make good art. Engaging with the art of with is inescapable and unavoidable. But it needs to be done well, intelligently, thoughtfully, testing the limits of collaboration rather than simply celebrating it. Better get on with it.

24. Charles Leadbeater, We Think
25. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Penguin 2008.
26. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture New York University Press, 2006

Art With People

Published on April 22, 2009 in Essays. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

The 20th century avant garde was built on the principle: separate and shock. The avant garde of the century to come will have as its principle: combine and connect. The web will encourage a culture in which art creates relationships and promotes interaction, encourages people to be a part of the work, if only in a small way.

This “participatory” avant-garde will not emerged from thin air. It will be fed by the way the web gives new energy to participatory approaches to art, a digital version of a folk culture in which authorship is shared and cumulative rather than individualistic.7 The modern culture of post-production, in which artists assemble their work using ingredients taken from other works, draws on this current. The artist becomes more like a DJ or a programmer, assembling a work from modules already available. Umberto Eco8 long ago declared that works of art were open to multiple interpretations; the reader was as active in creating meanings as the writer. Writing in the 1930s Walter Benjamin praised art that invited participation: art was better the more it encouraged people to leave behind their passive role as spectator.10 In the 1960s Guy Debord and the Situationist railed against the society of the spectacle, the empire of passive culture and in favour of art that activated its audience. Allan Kaprow11 became one of the best known practitioners of this philosophy with 1960s happenings – forerunners of flashmobs and alternate reality games – which were designed to bring art to life, to break down the barriers between the artist and the audience, art and the everyday.12 Public and community arts initiatives also have this aim.

What does this “participatory” avant garde stand for?
Art is essentially inter-subjective and dialogic, and not just in the way an audience might receive and interpret a work but in its constitution. Collaboration and participation is fundamental to the creation of the art not just its presentation and reception.13

The “participatory” avant-garde sees art as a kind of conversation, rather than a shock to the system. Art is not embodied in an object but lies in the encounter between the art and the audience, and among the audience themselves. Art is not simply the result of self-expression by the artists of a preconceived idea but the result of communication with the audience and other partners in the process. The artist’s role is not just to proclaim but to listen, interpret, incorporate ideas and adjust.14

The audience does not come to a gallery just to withdraw meaning from the art deposited there but to be part of the art, so that their movements and reactions change what is going on. The art wraps them in. It is not just the artist’s ideas and knowledge that are on display but those of the participating audience as well.

For the participatory avant-garde a work of art becomes more valuable the more it encourages people to join a conversation around it and to do something creative themselves. Participatory art is based on constant feedback and interaction, people talking, arguing, debating around the art and their views having some impact.

In this view of art, the role of the gallery or venue is not as a kind of artistic bank vault into which the work rich in meaning is deposited for safe keeping. An arts venue is a place that provides the setting for creative interaction and communication. Indeed anywhere that makes that kind of creative interaction possible can become the site for a work of art. Art should not be sequestered in special zones, where special people – the artists – deploy their special skills and experience. Kaprow argued art should be grounded in the common experience of every day life. By its nature participatory art cannot be contained in the space demarcated by the artist and the gallery; it must be capable of expanding or dissipating to wherever the participants want to take it. Participatory art cannot be pre-planned in every detail by the artist; otherwise it would be a sham. It has to be free to emerge, adapt and grow wherever the participants want to take it. Art15 becomes more powerful the more connections it makes, rather than from standing alone, unyielding and beyond reach. In this world a curator becomes more like a convenor or mixer, creating a space in which the right kinds of conversations can take place.


7. Charles Leadbeater, We Think Profile 2008
8. Nicholas Bourriaud Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Lukas and Sternberg, 2005
9. ?
10. Charles Leadbeater, We Think Profile 2008
11. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black and Red, 1984
12. Allan Kaprow and Jeff Kelley, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, University of California Press, 1996
13. Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces, Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics Les Presse Du Reel,France (1 Jan 1998)
14. Claire Bishop, Participation Whitechapel Art Gallery 2006
15. Kaprow and Kelley, Blurring Art and Life