The video I watched in preparation for my Study Visit to the Turner Prize,

reminded me of an OCA Blog Post I had read before.

http://weareoca.com/fine_art/what-is-art-for-2/ posted by Brian Eccleshall.

In the first video Alistair Hudson, Director of MMA (and part of the judging panel on the 2015 Turner Prize), talks about a ‘crisis’.  We need hospitals, but do we really need museums and galleries?  He states that visiting a museum is ‘Spectatorship’ and asks ‘What is the use of art in society? Why do we have it and what is it for?’

In part 2 he states that art needs to be part of society, it needs to be more useful.  At present we try to educate society about the importance of art in society, but he asks what if it is the other way around, what if what we do in society is the ‘programme’, what if art is what we do as citizens in the museum?  What if, as a citizen where our main goal is social development and to make the world a better place, what if we use art in that process?  In demonstrating and applying art in everyday life, a museum doesn’t become an island, but another civic building.  You will no longer be a spectator with the connoisseur acting as an intermediate.  Art is created out of how we use it, so art will be something we develop communally, we develop it as part of our daily lives.  ‘The language of usership comes from the digital culture, and a good analogy is YouTube, where the value of YouTube is not created necessarily by YouTube, it’s created by how it is used, it is created by people themselves, the user makes a video, uploads it, other users watch it, comment on it.  Similarly, could we create a museum which operates in the same way, where the value of the museum is created by all the sum activities of all its users?’

This is interesting, but I can’t help feeling he is concerned more about the future of museums, than what art is for, (although this is only part 2 of a series).  People already use YouTube and other social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook to share their art, although that is still spectatorship.

This post interest me because of my parallel project.  I am thinking about what my final piece of work for Assignment 6 can convey by way of invoking emotion and telling a story that couldn’t be conveyed by say a documentary, or by photographs.  An artist can be a ‘recorder’ and a story-teller and in that regards art is still ‘useful’ and relevant today.