François Matarasso

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  • This is not a provocation

    I’ve been reading, and reading about, Hannah Arendt. She’s one of the thinkers I admire whilst having reservations about some of their ideas or positions. That’s never seemed problematic: I don’t look for or trust gurus. I can learn a lot from working out why I disagree with something I’ve just read. But Arendt has…

  • Introducing ‘Amplify’

    Since I returned to work, my focus has been mainly on a European project called Amplify, which aims to develop innovative technological tools to support musicians at a time of extraordinary change. Working with music organisations in Scotland, Portugal, Italy and Spain, we are experimenting with ways of making digital technology serve the creative and…

  • Creative Altruism – A Welfare State principle

    The latest episode of the podcast that I co-host with Arlene Goldbard is available today from miaaw.net and all the usual places. This episode is a tribute to a key English arts company, Welfare State International (1968-2006) and in particular to their remarkable handbook, Engineers of the Imagination. The book appeared in 1983, when I was a…

  • Might be of interest…

    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…

  • Finding the good

    In a recent article about children’s books, Katherine Rundell quotes Coleridge as writing that in criticism it is vital:  never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former – we know it a priori – but every work has not…

  • Singing about the darkness

    Yesterday, I recorded the next episode of A Culture of Possibility with Arlene Goldbard. I’d stepped back from the podcast last year, when I got sick, so this was our first recording for four or five months and I was anxious about how it would go. We’d actually planned to do it last week, but…