Published on: 4/10/2010.
by LISA KING
THE TWO-DAY ART SYMPOSIUM of the National Cultural Foundation (NCF) got started yesterday at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
The theme was Taking Your Art To Market, and artistes and patrons were urged to become creative entrepreneurs and think seriously about the arts and continuous implementation of strategies aimed at developing the arts as a business.
Dr Donna Hunte-Cox, chief executive officer of the NCF, stressed the importance of being prepared, being aware of the products they offered, knowing what makes them different to others, and considering if they satisfy the customers.
She added that the artistes are responsible for charting their own course and should use the tools available to them to prepare themselves for the public.
Keynote speaker Joanne Tull, academic coordinator and lecturer in Carnival Studies in the Department of Creative And Festival Arts, University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, Trinidad, spoke on the theme Strategic Planning For Our Arts Enterprise.
Tull highlighted the importance of strategic planning and the need for artistes to get involved in the business.
Additionally, she noted the need for continuous implementation of new strategies, pointing out that strategic planning involved finding something, not focusing solely on it, but "tweaking" the things that one is not so good at and working on them.
She also noted the importance of networking, merging, developing partnerships and linking into the human resource pool.
Tull said her vision for the region was to see the development of an industrial policy focused on the development of export opportunities, further development of the education platform, and expansion of local development opportunities in terms of strengthening small businesses. This would also include strengthening intellectual property laws.
On the factors that hinder Caribbean success on the global market, Tull said, "It has to do with our ability to be ready . . . we may not have all of the tools at our disposal and in many instances we do not avail ourselves to the tools in terms of the business side of the arts and culture.
"It is also about having a particular kind of mindset. Many of us have not thought really about what we want for ourselves in terms of arts and being creative entrepreneurs."
The UWI lecturer pointed out that some of the other challenges related to the fact that there was no regional support and the infrastructure as a whole remained weak. She added that because of that we still had not recognised that there was a lot of responsibility on our shoulders as art and creative entrepreneurs to forge a way in a such a context.
She said it was very important that artistes have a vision and clarity about that vision, stressing that their task required lobbying and strong advocacy. She lamented that to date ways had not been found to effect policy change on a governmental level.
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