What was it organised to achieve, the largest arts conference ever held in Northern Ireland? Why did 1,300 people gather on Tuesday in the Waterfront Hall, Belfast?
The stated aim of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland was to "establish new relationships between the private sector, arts organisations and individual artists in Northern Ireland." The idea of presenting the arts as a unified sector and marketing them to business is not new; Temple Bar Properties did it very effectively three years ago with the high profile European conference, The Economy Of The Arts at Dublin Castle. This was preceded by the very influential Arts Council-commissioned, Coopers and Lybrand report, which was full of quotable statistics, like that as many people work in the arts and cultural sectors as work in software and hardware combined.
Belfast's Consortium For The Arts only lasted a day and could be little more than tokenistic: there were no small working groups and no speakers from outside Britain and Ireland. For these reasons, there was less opportunity for the networking and the swapping of small, specific bits of information which were the real benefits of the Dublin Castle conference, and the main problems with the brief showed up; and the passion which drives the arts joins, say, love and religious devotion, as among the few truly unmeretricious emotions which humans have; and the arts are so diverse that they cannot be seen as a united sector, except by someone who knows very little (that's fine if he's a New York businessman with arts-bound greenbacks in his pocket).
The first point was strongly made by the clash between the Chairman of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Donnell Deeny's flashing up on the screen a balance sheet showing the appreciation which the Council's art collection achieved and arguing that it made "Ulster common sense" to buy art, and jazz musician and art collector, George Melly's insistence: "No, art is not a commodity. Art is a passion."
