For various reasons, I feel rather out of touch with the art world, even that community-oriented part of it that has been my home for so long. I suspect it’s a permanent change as our paths gradually diverge: we have different concerns nowadays. The art world will continue to develop new worries, ideas, practices and preoccupations with which mine, which have deepened but never changed, are inevitably and increasingly out of step. It’s just time.
Still, for now, I am alert to some of what’s happening and I want to share two or three things that might be of interest to readers of this site. The first is the excellent writing of Mark Robinson, who is very much in touch with the UK arts world. He writes as Thinking Practice on Substack, and publishes a regular newsletter to which you can subscribe. His latest post, on the Secretary of State’s Jennie Lee lecture and the pioneering predecessor in whose name it was given, is a good example of Mark’s distinctive take on cultural policy: engaged, constructive and clear-sighted.
Another email newsletter I always read when it arrives is Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files. This is an artist who has only become more interesting as he has grown older. Grief has taken him into new ways of creating and new kinds of creation. Embracing vulnerability seems only to make him braver. Through The Red Hand Files he invites people to ask him anything and he answers those questions which speak to him with evident care and honesty. The answers aren’t always comfortable, but they’re always thought provoking.
Much writing about art or cultural policy is dull, or worse, so it’s always a pleasure to read these newsletters when they arrive in my inbox. It’s also good to see a small publisher encouraging new writing about community art, a sadly neglected field even today. Nick Owen’s day job is running The Mighty Creatives, an organisation that works with young people through art and creativity. He still finds time to run a Nick Owen Publishing which has launched a Community Arts Writing Award to mark the 30th anniversary of the community arts undergraduate courses at Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. He’s inviting essays of 2,000 to 3,000 words that reflect the writer’s own experience. Three will be included in an anthology of new writing and one will win the £500 award. The deadline is 31 March 2025 and you can find more details here.
The painting above is Emil Nolde’s Clematis and Dahlia (1940), for no better reason than that I like it.
François Matarasso 
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Responses to “Might be of interest…”
Especially for those of us out in the sticks, it’s affirming that there is such a hefty bundle of 30-ish-th anniversaries around this period. The map may not have been entirely and certainly defined, but clearly, paths found, are in place.
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As you say, paths were found and are in place. And speaking for myself, I’m against certain definition. My hope for our work lies in the capacity of the next generations to make it their own for the world that is their own. I’m confident they’ll do great things with it.
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Me and Nick Cave 👍😳thanks Francois! Hope things are heading in the right direction for you health wise? Good to see you writing again. I may be in touch but I also feel that growing distance which try as I might to think otherwise is at least partly age related. (If Jennie Lee’s White Paper was a person we’d have been in the same year at school.)
Take care
Mark
Sent from Outlook for iOShttps://aka.ms/o0ukef
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Thanks Mark, I’m getting better now, and writing again, mostly on something that has nothing to do with my work but which has preoccupied me for many years. I would like to get it finished if I can, but it takes energy I don’t always have. I like the idea of being the same age as the first arts policy. I’m the same age as rock ‘n’ roll (depending on when you date it!
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