What process do you establish to give £500 away?
What questions would you want to ask / maybe something about our relationship with money?
If you had money to give away / how do you give it away?
If you had a building given to you how would you use it?
If you were not paying for water, electricity, business rates . . . how would you engage with people, money and yes the building?
What is our relationship with art as we draw towards the end of 2012?
I ask these questions following an excursion to Leeds where I was invited as a judge on what can only be described as a talent contest run by LAB under the banner of IDEA in the graphic of IKEA.
But making the graphic for IKEA into IDEA does not make your idea of a talent contest any better than the massed produced furniture produced and purchased at IKEA.
If this was a good idea then someone needs to go back to the drawing board and have a good look at IDEAS becoming IKEAS.
In a building that was once a club and looks like its been decked out by IKEA, 'nice' but over posh and working too hard but nice, LAB is located having acquired a building for nothing through what series of devices. It's an institute full of dreams and potential -
Artists arrived to be in contest with other artists.
Artists traveled from Bristol and Brighton hoping to secure £500.
They left out of pocket and defeated.
Engaging with money / where ever it comes from / brings responsibility and I suggest that we are at an opportune time to question what we do with money. Rather than generating misery engage with it in a sublime manner and share it / enabling artists to be supported within the context of the most radical gesture.
What could of been that gesture this time round?