Investing, Advocating, Promoting... strategically

www.variant.org.uk

Andrew Dixon, Chief Executive of Creative Scotland, interviewed by Daniel Jewesbury

Daniel Jewesbury: I suppose the most obvious question is, how is Creative Scotland different from the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, its predecessor organisations?

Andrew Dixon: Well, in a number of ways. Firstly, we’ve taken on the combined responsibilities for TV, the arts and creative industries, also the responsibility for stimulating cultural export; secondly, we are very committed to not just being a funding body. We are a funding body, or investment agency as we call it, but we are much more of a promotional body and much more of an advocate for the cultural sector that can give something money. We are not about just monitoring what happens to that money, we are about getting behind the cultural organisation, getting behind the artist and trying to shine the spotlight on him and to package things together in a way that tells a story of what’s happening in the cultural sector in Scotland.

I use the analogy, we’re not just a cash machine in Edinburgh that dishes out grants but we will dish out a lot of grants but, whilst we are a supporting organisation, the support doesn’t stop, we have to move on and find how we can help promote them. It kind of manifests itself in a couple of examples already.

One is our artist residencies programme. I mean, when I arrived, everywhere I went in Scotland I found an artist in residence. You go to the Isle of Skye and there is a visual artist, writer, musician in residence, doing fantastic work, hidden away, nobody else would know that this is happening because their work is not shared more widely and they would be working in isolation from other artists in residency in Stirling and so on. So I came back from visiting the artists in residence that we had, at the time we had 57, and we put extra resources…READ IN FULL AT http://www.variant.org.uk/