The BFI (British Film Institute) - a BOP client - has released new figures showing that British cinema broke a number of records in 2011, despite the tough economic climate. Gross box office broke through the £1bn barrier for the first time, reaching £1.04bn, a rise of 5% on 2010. Part of this increase was due to an exceptionally strong performance from British independent films, which recorded their largest ever share (13.5%) of the overall market.
Meanwhile, total investment in UK-based film production reached £1.26 bn in 2011, another new record, although the actual number of films produced declined.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 was easily the most popular film of the year, taking over £73m at the UK and Ireland box office. In second and third places were two British independents: The King's Speech and The Inbetweeners Movie, both of which took over £45m.
In addition to his occasional posts on this blog, BOP consultant Callum Lee also writes short pieces for 2010lab.tv, a pan-European cultural website. These mostly focus on aspects of London's arts and culture scene. Here are a few of his recent articles:
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has released its annual study of trends in digital music: IFPI Digital Music Report 2012. The press release has links to the full report and a key facts and figures summary. (We linked to the 2011 report here.)
This year's trends are broadly positive. IFPI reckons global digital music sales grew by 8% last year, to $5.2bn, compared with a 5% increase in 2010. This is the first year since IFPI began recording this data in 2004 that the rate has accelerated year-on-year. In the United States (and South Korea), digital revenues now exceed those from physical sales. The biggest digital music services such as iTunes and Spotify are also spreading rapidly, with operations in 58 countries in 2011, versus 23 in 2010.
Nevertheless, piracy continues to be an issue, and not just in music - the IFPI quotes an estimate that 60 per cent of e-book downloads in Germany are illegal.
Earlier this year the Creative Industries Council asked Skillset, the sector skills council responsible for the creative media industries, to lead its skills working group and to consult with the creative sector to help it realise its growth potential. This week the report Skillset produced was endorsed by the Council. (BOP worked with the group and helped to compile the evidence base on which the report draws.)
Skillset identified eight cross-cutting challenges for the creative industries, from industry ownership of investment in skills, to the fusion of creative and technical disciplines in education and the need to cut red tape for businesses employing freelancers. From these, it made 17 recommendations. They include:
Create an online professional learning network for employers and individuals, implement sector-wide management and leadership programmes and establish virtual boards of experienced professionals to provide support and guidance to start-ups and small creative companies.
Reform the ICT syllabus in schools. Computer science, arts and/or a creative subject (music, film, media, and photography) should be included in the National Curriculum as core subjects, and also as options within the English Baccalaureate.
Improve the quality of industry internships, with employers not just complying with legislation but also working with trade unions, employee representative groups and Government to challenge poor working practices and champion the principles of fair access to the sector.
Improve the national account system for the Creative Industries by working with the Office for National Statistics to shape the methodology for data collection; reduce duplication, identify knowledge gaps and drive up the quality of the evidence base.
The Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, described the report thus:
This is an excellent report. It gives us a clear picture of the issues we face in making sure that those working in our creative industries have the skills needed to drive growth. We need to do all we can to develop the talent in our creative businesses. I urge all involved in the creative industries to take these recommendations on board.
The think tank Centre for Cities launched its Cities Outlook 2012 report at what was, by their high standards, a slightly shambolic event at City Hall in London on Monday. (We blogged about the 2011 report here.) Among the speakers was Greg Clark, the minister for cities, who affirmed his commitment to elected mayors and the City Deals initiative. (The text of his speech can be found here.)
While all cities have seen unemployment rise since 2008, the report suggests the North-South divide seems to be growing wider again, as public sector job cuts hit Northern cities harder. The dominance of London and the smaller cities in the South East around it - Milton Keynes, Reading, Cambridge - is evident in almost every measure the Centre looks at, though the CfC argues this is driven more by industrial structure than geography: Southern cities tend to have more knowledge-intensive jobs, which have been less affected by the recession. Among the 'core cities', however, only Bristol has an employment rate above the national average.
Arts Council England yesterday named the 16 organisations which are to become its Renaissance Major Partners for museum services. The list (see below) has generally been well-received; see, for instance, Maurice Davies of the Museums Association here. There were, inevitably, some which missed out. Perhaps the most notable was Museums Sheffield, which reactedangrily to the news.The successful applicants were:
Beamish and Bowes Museum
Birmingham Museums Trust (Birmingham City Council, Thinktank)
Bristol City Council
Cumbria Museums Consortium (Tullie House, Wordsworth Trust, Lakeland Arts Trust)
Horniman Museum and Gardens
Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust
Leeds Museums and Galleries
Manchester Partnership (Manchester City Galleries, Manchester Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery)
Museum of London
Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service
Oxford University Museums and Oxfordshire County Museums Service
Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter and Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery
Tom Campbell is a BOP associate and the former cultural strategy manager for the Mayor of London. In this guest post he argues that the creative sector needs to pay much more attention to the imminent changes in student visa rules.
The controversies over the government’s changes to the funding of higher education (HE) and the introduction of variable tuition fees have meant that the creative sector has so far paid little attention to another, arguably more sinister, threat. It has long been recognised that one of the great strengths of the UK’s creative economy has been its HE sector – its specialist universities, art and design colleges and conservatoires. It is to these institutions that some of the most talented individuals in the world have flocked, studying and researching in creative disciplines ranging from computer animation to jewellery design. London’s HE institutions alone currently have some 100,000 overseas students, equivalent to around £2bn a year in export earnings.
All of this is now under threat from new Home Office immigration regulations. As of April this year, new rules will end the right of non-EU students to stay on and work after completing their studies. Previously, students were automatically eligible to apply for a two-year work visa. From April, they will instead have to return as soon as they have completed their studies, taking their talents, intellectual property and entrepreneurial energies with them.
It matters little if these reforms have been made willingly or, as many suspect, by reluctant government ministers fearful of colleagues on the backbenches. Either way, the consequences are likely to be dire. Universities themselves, trying to attract students in an ever more competitive global market, fear a large drop in overseas applications. Those who do still come will no longer be able to stay and apply their talents in a commercial environment to the benefit of the UK. Nor will they be able to establish exactly the kinds of business relationships that UK firms need if they are to prosper in overseas markets. Instead, all of those designers, architects, computer scientists and film-makers will be immediately going back to North America, China, India, Brazil and elsewhere to develop their careers, establish world-beating firms and boost their domestic economies.
For London in particular, a city whose wealth is partly based on successive waves of immigrants and which claims to be the pre-eminent world creative capital, it is hard to think of a policy more likely to bleed it of talent and enterprise. And for a government with much-vaunted ambitions for re-balancing the national economy and growing through international markets and knowledge-intensive sectors, the new immigration rules are not just a glaring instance of incoherence, but a senseless and damaging own goal.
ixia, which describes itself as England's public art think tank, has just published its first survey of the public art sector in England (while responses were received from the other nations of the UK, they were too few for the results to be statistically robust). Almost 700 people took part, of whom around 500 worked directly in the sector, whether as artists, consultants or in local government.
As ixia acknowledges, the sector is a fragmented one, which makes this survey particularly useful. The respondents believed that public art's most important role is in shaping national and regional identity. Among the survey's other findings:
In England, during 2010-11, there was an active and core public art sector of at least 1,250 people in a market worth at least £56m
The public art sector is largely driven by private sector money aligned to public sector policy. ixia estimates that 80% of public art funding can be linked to public art policies within local authorities and the regeneration, health and education sectors
The average cost of a public art project commissioned by a local authority, or via the regeneration, health and education sectors is approximately £73,000
Many artists are optimistic about the future, but those workers closer to funding sources are much more pessimistic, predicting a fall of around 40% in the overall size of the market during 2011-12
There are approximately 500 artists working in public art in England, with around 40% earning less than £10,000 last year
Dr Claire Donovan of Brunel University has recently been appointed as the second fellow on the DCMS/AHRC/ESRC programme on measuring cultural value. She is conducting Phase 2 of the project, following on from Dr Dave O'Brien (now of City University), whose Phase 1 report we blogged about last year.
The debate over measuring cultural value is well-trodden ground, and it remains to be seen if Dr Donovan, whose academic background is in the sociology of knowledge, will be able to add much original insight. One interesting step she has taken, though, is to launch an interactive blog on the DCMS's website, called Priceless?, to encourage people in the cultural sector to contribute their own thoughts. It will run for 12 weeks, with eight themed discussions. Some notable figures from the sector have already picked up the gauntlet, including Nick Ewbank and Gayle McPherson. Robert Hewison too has chipped in with these rather tart comments:
Welcome to the Valuing Culture debate, which began in 2003 when the then Secretary of State for Culture, Tessa Jowell, attended a conference organised by the National Theatre, the National Gallery, Demos and AEA Associates.
I wonder if you are hoping to reinvent the wheel ... It is excellent to have another contributor to the field, but it may difficult to get very far when Phase One of your project has already sold the pass by saying that the only way forward is by the Treasury Green Book.
This post on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog gives a taste of Donovan's style.
Last Friday, Alex Homfray from BOP Consulting took part in an live webchat for the Guardian Culture Professionals Network (see this earlier blogpost). Apart from Alex, the participants were Mark Robinson of Thinking Practice, Sarah Thelwall of MyCake, Andrew Erskine of Tom Fleming Creative Consultancy and Keith Evans of Cida Co. Their collective wisdom has been written up by Matthew Caines in this Guardian article.
One comment Alex made in the webchat which wasn't included in the article was his summing-up of some of the key steps in future proofing:
Join an unfamiliar network. Grow to love data. Benchmark yourself. What do your audiences really want? Audit your assets and maximise their income potential. Incentivise entrepreneurialism for all your staff. Property developers and High Street landlords can be your friends.
We missed this when it came out last year, but the DCMS's CASE programme has published a qualitative study it commissioned from GfK NOP Social Research looking at fundraising activity in arts, culture, heritage and sport. The report is based on 17 case studies, which included the SAGE Gateshead, Historic Royal Palaces, the Museum of East Anglian Life and Salcombe Rugby Club. It found the financial crisis had induced changes in donor behaviour:
Donors were thought to have become more exacting in their expectations, with an increased requirement for tangible and measurable outcomes. This in turn created a new requirement for organisations to demonstrate sound business planning and financial management, and an ability to generate benefits for potential donors. Some had become practiced in this; while for others the new environment required a culture shift, as they had previously relied heavily upon strong personal relationships with their major funders.
Today's guest blogger, Jim Barratt, was Head of Research & Statistics at the UK Film Council from 2003 to 2006, and is the author of Bad Taste, a book about Peter Jackson’s debut film. He writes an occasional blog about film business research at www.biggerpictureresearch.com, where you can readhis further thoughts on the Film Policy Review Panel’s proposals.
‘[A] key goal of public policy for film should be to connect the widest possible range of audiences throughout the UK with the broadest and richest range of British films and films from around the world.’ Recommendation 1.
A press release issued last week by Downing Street advised that the Film Policy Review Panel, led by former Culture Secretary Lord Smith, was expected to recommend a ‘rebalancing’ of Lottery funding in support of more crowd pleasing, mainstream British films.
In the absence of the Panel’s full report (publishedyesterday), this heavily spun story drew sharp intakes of breath across the film sector. Success in the independent film business, assuming we could all agree a definition (not as easy as you might think), is almost as elusive as the Higgs Boson. Only the most naive commentator would suggest reducing film policy to the selective backing of box office winners, which would mark both a poverty of ambition and a misunderstanding of the way the business works.
Fortunately, in this case the main feature did not live down to the dim promise of the trailer. Because we can now read in full the fruits of the Panel’s deliberations, and it’s a relief to find proposals of genuine merit and substance.
While much in the report will be familiar to anyone acquainted with UK Film Council era strategising, the report’s framing device, which places audiences at the centre of public policy, is a welcome departure. Unusually for a film policy document you have to wait until chapter four to find the first references to production funding (of mainstream films or otherwise). Compare that with, say, the UK Film Council’s last three-year plan, which leads with production funding as its primary ‘core activity’.
In contrast, the first three chapters of today’s report take in the audience, new technology and theatrical exhibition; topics usually found much lower down the billing. Significantly, the opening chapter addresses the goal of audience development from the perspectives of ‘education, access and choice’, aligning public policy with the need ‘to maximise audience access to films of every kind throughout the UK’.
This reorientation of film policy, placing audiences at its heart, is the most refreshing feature of the Panel’s approach, because for too long policy interventions have targeted upstream development and production activity on the assumption that benefits will flow naturally downstream to audiences. But this is faulty logic.
In truth, the anticipation (and cultivation) of audience taste and predilection is active at every stage in the independent film value chain, from an individual film’s inception to its marketing and subsequent exploitation. And in financial terms, revenues only begin to flow back along the links of the chain once paying customers (i.e. audiences) become involved.
It remains to be seen whether this shift in emphasis is merely rhetorical or is evidence of something deeper (and we still have to await the Government’s official response), but it’s a positive start. In filmland the audience is king, and the Film Policy Review Panel’s report is the opening proclamation of a timely Restoration movement.
Late last year, the National Campaign for the Arts (NCA) released the first UK Arts Index. At that time, access to the full report was confined to NCA members, but the NCA has just made thereport available to a general readership.
Compiled with the help of Audiences London and Audiences UK, the index aims to be an annual 'health-check' for the arts in Britain. It uses 20 indicators, including funding, employment, donations and engagement, and finds that the overall health of the sector stayed relatively steady from 2007/08 to 2009/10. Both business and individual contributions fell significantly over that time (by 17% and 13% respectively), but this was offset by increases in Lottery funding programmes.
However, the report also found large and growing gaps between some of the English regions: for instance, giving by individuals varied from an average of £36.36 per person a year in London to just 53p in the East Midlands. At the 'nations' level, Scotland's score fell quite sharply compared to the other three nations.
The Guardian Culture Professionals network is a relatively new initiative by the newspaper. Aimed at the arts community, it aims to bring together advice and best practice from across the sector, and often has interesting articles on aspects of the arts business.
It has recently started doing weekly live webchats on arts-related themes. Alex Homfray of BOP will be one of this week's panel of experts, discussing: Beyond the five-year plan: future proofing your arts organisation. The chat runs from 12 noon to 2pm - more details here. If you've got questions for Alex, please join in!
2012 has been designated the Year of Creative Scotland by the Scottish Government. The year is one of a series of 'focus years' running to 2013 which build on the perceived success of Homecoming in 2009. The programme is being billed as:
A chance to spotlight, celebrate and promote Scotland’s cultural and creative strengths on a world stage, and to position Scotland as one of the world’s most creative nations to audiences at home and across the world.
Some £6.5m of National Lottery money will be spent of a range of events, including the Creative Place awards, honouring creativity in smaller communities, and a celebration of contemporary Scottish printmaking, to be held at Traquair House in the summer.
Meanwhile it is also an important year for Creative Scotland the organisation. It is undertaking a number of sector reviews - those for theatre and music have already been commissioned - to help it understand its sectors better and to guide its future investment plans.
At the end of last year the Arts Council released an analysisof the 2010/11 returns of 829 of its 843 Regularly Funded Organisations. The report inludes a wealth of data and suggests that the sector is holding its own in these challenging economic times. Among its findings:
London-based organisations (some of which have national remits) dominated the portfolio. They received 50 per cent of the total Arts Council England subsidy, put on 29 per cent of the total number of activities and reached 52 per cent of the total audience.
Job numbers were holding up: permanent staff increased by 1%, contractual staff by 3%, and volunteers by 18% on the previous year. 17% of staff were from Black or minority ethnic backgrounds, a small decline on the previous year, while the proportion of disabled staff remained at 2%.
Earned income and local authority increased from 2009/10 by 6% and 3% respectively. Other public subsidy increased by 20% while Arts Council England subsidy increased by 2%.
The video game industry has become one of the most lucrative sectors of the entertainment business. As this report from the Economist points out, its $56bn of sales in 2010 were twice those of the recorded music industry, and a quarter more than the magazine industry. One game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, achieved sales of $650m in just five days.
Reading this report reminded us of this excellent article by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books from 2009, in which he discusses video games' lack of visibility in the wider culture:
There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist ... They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t. Video games have people who play them, and a wider public for whom they simply don’t exist.
Lanchester goes on to discuss some of the complexity and artistry found in games, including a profile of the Walt Disney of video games, Shigeru Miyamoto.
The Royal Town Planning Institute's Scottish branch recently published three very short papers looking at how planners can help to 'create great places in difficult times'. Experts were brought together at a series of dinners, and each paper summarises the subsequent discussion. While they have a Scottish focus, many of the points raised have wider applications. The papers are:
This year's European Capitals of Cultures are Maribor in Slovenia and Guimarães in Portugal. Maribor has around 160,000 inhabitants, and has chosen the theme of Pure Energy for its year (arguing that creativity + heritage + education + research + digital literacy + cultural tourism + economy + ecology = pure energy). It hopes the year will help the sustainable development of the wider eastern Slovenia region. More details can be foundhere.
Guimarães, a city of 50,000 poeple, also has ambitions to use culture to encourage wider economic development (in northern Portugal in its case), but has chosen to build its year around three 'values': City, Citizenship and Participation, and the European dimension. Their website can be found here.
In recent years a number of commentators have argued that the 'soft power' of a nation's culture is as important as its military strength in assessing that country's place in the world. Measuring such soft power is far from easy, though. One body which has tried to do so is the Berlin-based Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. Its Cultural Diplomacy Outlook Report 2011 is a wide-ranging study looking at many aspects of what it calls cultural diplomacy, in the public, private and third sectors. One of the most interesting parts is its Index:
The cultural diplomacy index charts the increasing prevalence of soft power and public diplomacy as a means of international dialogue. The index evaluates various government activities to determine whether their respective cultural diplomacy programmes are substantial, constructive and effective.
The index produced by the ICD ranked forty countries by these means, and found that Germany and the Netherlands came joint first, with Norway in third. The UK was fifth, the US was seventh, and India was the leading emerging economy, in tenth place.
The Design Commission, a standing commission composed of parliamentarians from all parties and leading representatives from business, industry and the public sector, has just produced its first report, Restarting Britain: Design Education and Growth. The report, which was sponsored by the Design Council, Creative & Cultural Skills and CHEAD, looks at ways in which design education can be improved.
The report makes four recommendations:
Government needs a national design strategy that it takes ownership of in a well-informed and pro-active way.
Whilst government should oppose any move to remove design from the national curriculum, we also need to think again about how design operates in schools
Further education routes into the sector need to be expanded and developed
Higher education centres of excellence ... need protecting and funding.
At the end of last year, Ofcom published its International Communications Report for 2011. This report offers a huge array of facts and figures on communications usage across 17 countries. It finds that the UK is one of the heaviest users of many new technologies. Some 79% of UK consumers had bought goods online in 2010 - the highest percentage in Europe - while smartphone ownership (which doubled between 2009 and 2010) was also the highest in Europe. Ownership of digital video recorders, meanwhile, was second only to the United States. Such trends were driven, Ofcom implies, by the relative cheapness of such services in the UK, compared with the major European countries and the US.
However, this growth in new media usage is not necessarily coming at the expense of older ones - the amount of time Britons spent watching TV also rose in 2010.
The review into the future of Britain's high streets, conducted by Mary Portas, has been published by BIS, the business department. The Portas Review acknowledges the challenges facing high-street retail, from the growth in online retailing to the rise of the supermarkets and the expansion of out-of-town retail parks, and set outs 28 recommendations to try and tackle some of these problems. These include:
Empower successful Business Improvement Districts to take on more responsibilities and powers and become “Super-BIDs”
Make it easier for people to become market traders by removing unnecessary regulations so that anyone can trade on the high street unless there is a valid reason why not
Support imaginative community use of empty properties through Community Right to Buy, Meanwhile Use and a new “Community Right to Try”
Make explicit a presumption in favour of town centre development in the wording of the National Planning Policy Framework
The Portas Review has generally been well-received (see here for examples) but from our point of view it is disappointing to note that culture's potential role in reviving high streets gets only limited coverage. Portas says in her introduction that "I want to put the heart back into the centre of our high streets, re-imagined as destinations for socialising, culture, health, wellbeing, creativity and learning." but, apart from brief mentions of the Meanwhile Project, Coventry Artspace and Brixton Village, she doesn't really return to culture and creativity in the remainder of her report (though she does thank Urban Pollinators in particular for their contribution - we have blogged about their work before). While Portas cannot, of course, cover everything in her report, this is something of a missed opportunity.
BOP Consulting is moving office today. We are leaving Margaret Street in Fitzrovia after five years, and heading east to St John Street in Farringdon. As a result, BOP staff will be working from home today, so if you need to get hold of us, please try our mobiles. Our email server will also be disconnected for a few hours as it is moved.
Please bear with us - normal service should be resumed tomorrow.
The Centre for Cities has written an interesting report pointing out that some of the smaller cities and larger towns of the South East and East of England punch well above their weight in economic terms. The report, Investing in Growth Cities, looks at the 15 members of Regional Cities East (the sponsors of the research), which range from Peterborough in the north to Southampton in the west, and include Oxford, Brighton and Milton Keynes. It finds they accounted for 27% of net jobs growth in England from 1998-2008 (the Centre for Cities does not say what their share of England's population is, but we reckon it's under 10%). The report goes on to suggest ways the cities might build on this good performance.
Last week the DCMS published its latest set of creative industries economic estimates. This is a startling document on several levels. We can't remember the last time we saw a government report as shoddily produced as this one. The text is littered with grammatical mistakes, typos, formatting issues, and odd choices of wording: the creative industries themselves are several times referred to as 'the Creative Industry', for instance. There is no sign that the document has been proofread which, given how often these figures are quoted in our sector, is alarming.*
[*These comments refer to the text of the version the DCMS published on 8 December. It seems this was a pre-publication draft which was posted on the website by mistake. On 22 December, a revised version was posted with corrected presentation and formatting. All the data estimates are unchanged from the earlier version.]
The numbers, too, are startling. The DCMS has made some changes to its methodology, which have major consequences. Firstly, after years of treating all the computer software sector as creative, it has now decided (after consultation) to drop most of it, keeping codes related to computer gaming. It has also, seemingly on the advice of the Office for National Statistics, decided to drop the 'scaling' it was applying to the Gross Value Added (GVA) of the sector. This amounted to a 'top-up' of 30% to account for deficiencies in the survey data, which is now thought unnecessary. Some other smaller changes have been made to the methodology too, including switching to the Annual Population Survey instead of the Labour Force Survey.
The results indicate that:
Total creative employment (i.e. both inside and outside the creative industries) was 1.5m in 2010, up fractionally on the previous year (on this new basis of calculation). Just under 900,000 of these jobs are in the creative industries. The larger figure amounts to 5.1% of all jobs.
GVA in 2009 was £36.3bn, or 2.9% of the UK's total. Half of it came from advertising and publishing.
Exports were 10.6% of GDP (in 2009), driven by publishing and TV & Radio.
There were 107,000 creative enterprises in the UK, 5.1% of the total.
The numbers also appear to confirm something that BOP has written about before: the dominance of the greater South East of England in the UK's creative economy. According to these figures, the East of England alone has more creative enterprises than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together.
The DCMS points out, fairly enough, that the new basis of calculating the estimates means direct comparisons shouldn't be made between these figures and their previous ones. Nonetheless, it has to be said that these new figures are far lower: the DCMS's estimate for creative employment in last year's report was 2.3m, GVA was 5.6% of the UK total and creative enterprises numbered 182,000. Such big changes are unlikely to do much for the sector's credibility.
This is BOP's final selection of our cultural highlights of 2011 - architecture and discoveries of the year. The descriptions come from the BOP staff member who nominated them. We'd love to hear your choices too.
Architecture
A number of striking new cultural buildings opened this year including the Riverside Museum in Glasgow and the Marlowe theatre in Canterbury. Will such schemes be a thing of the past in the age of austerity?
New building of the year: The Hepworth Wakefield (architect: David Chipperfield).
A triumph of light and space that wonderfully showcases the collection and blends beautifully with the weir; at last, a reason to visit Wakefield!
Regeneration project of the year: Central St Martins, King’s Cross (architect: Stanton Williams)
The new Central Saint Martins campus at Kings Cross is stunning and it anchors the huge Kings Cross Central regeneration scheme: deft building design combined with clever place-making.
Refurbishment of the year: National Museum of Scotland (museum design: Ralph Appelbaum Associates)
It was nice before, but it’s a fabulous space since the re-opening!
Discoveries
This category includes those things, places or people that the rest of the world may have known about, but which we only stumbled across in 2011.
Frank’s Café and Campari Bar
The Frank’s Bar / Bold Tendencies double act at the top of their Peckham multi-storey car park deserves a prize. It’s a superb venue for a summer drink, a band, and to look at some interesting (but mostly awful) sculptures.
Steffen Dam: A Danish artist whose elegant riffs (in glass) on plant and marine life really caught the eye at the Craft Council’s COLLECT fair in the early summer.
Les Belles Images by Simone de Beauvoir: First published in France in 1966, this is a mesmerising portrait of how consumerism shapes the way we construct our identity and present ourselves to the external world.
Georgia (former Soviet republic of): OK, I sort of knew where Georgia was before, but on a visit this year I was really struck by the vibrancy of its capital, its hospitable people, its food, and the beauty and variety of the landscapes once you leave Tbilisi.
Vik Muniz: A Brazilian artist based in New York, Muniz is a vivid example of how the arts can change lives. One of his projects, portrayed in the documentary Wasteland, involved him working with garbage pickers in Rio de Janeiro: the art they created together has been shown in galleries around the globe.
Finally, a rediscovery. This list, and others like it, focus on the new, but the pleasures of re-visiting classics can be considerable. As we age, we bring different perspectives and experiences to our encounters with great work.
Rediscovery of the year: Bleak House by Charles Dickens
I’ve started re-reading novels, and it’s a revelation. The story and its characters are the same but the nuance and the meaning are different. Bleak House is still a rattling good detective story and satire on the law and lawyers, but now what I love are the reflections on how to live well and, in particular, on the nature of love and the curse of money.
At BOP we are choosing our cultural highlights of 2011 - these are our choices of TV, art and songs. The descriptions come from the BOP staff member who nominated them.
Television
2011 was the year British TV got its mojo back. BBC drama output has been the strongest in years with distinctive new work from British and Irish writers (Abi Morgan’s The Hour, Hugo Blick’s Shadow Line, and Ronan Bennett’s Hidden); Channel 4 triumphed with the sitcom Fresh Meat and its compelling drama about the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict, The Promise; More4 weighed in with Mark Cousins’ magisterial The Story of Film, and BBC4 continued to excel by adding top notch European drama (The Killing, Spiral) to its already formidable roster of science and music programming and documentaries on disparate subjects you never knew you wanted a documentary on (Ice? Indian Rolls-Royces? The British chemical industry?!). Not that we’ve chosen any of these as our winner, mind you.
TV programme of the year: Made in Chelsea (E4)
It may have been slow and awkward, but Made in Chelsea was the surprise BOP hit of the autumn. Will Caggy ever get back together with Spencer? What really happened with Hugo and Millie? We can’t wait for the next series.
Runner-up: The Apprentice (BBC1)
Despite refreshing the format, the programme is, in truth, starting to show its age a bit in what was its seventh series – still great fun, though.
Art
In a good year for art, a number of excellent exhibitions didn’t quite make the cut – George Shaw’s show of his melancholy suburban landscapes at the Baltic, for instance. We picked three that stood out for us:
Art exhibition of the year: Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern.
We are in the presence of greatness: a painter of staggering range, technique and power.
Runners-up:
Tracey Emin, Love is What You Want, at the Hayward Gallery.
Emin showed her range and depth of work in this show. She is a class act and the one of the few YBAs who actually had some lasting ideas.
de Kooning: A Retrospective at MOMA, New York.
What an artist! Not content with inventing abstract expressionism, Willem de Kooning constantly redefined the art-form over six decades and was instrumental in making New York the world’s art capital.
Public art project of the year:Martin Creed’s The Scotsman Steps, Edinburgh.
104 steps of different coloured marble; on a sunny day, they’re a low-key but effective and beautiful addition to everyday life.
Music
It was women who continued to make the running in music in 2011, led by the world-conquering Adele. We particularly liked the new albums by Gillian Welch, Anna Calvi and Zola Jesus.
Song of the year: Video Games by Lana Del Rey.
A moody ballad, a great video, and a dash of controversy over her alleged inauthenticity – a winning combination.
Best album track not released as a single: Moving Further Away by The Horrors (from the album Skying).
Psychedelia, motorik krautrock and trance meet to monumental effect.
Tomorrow we pick our architecture and discoveries of the year.
It’s the season when newspapers publish their ‘best ofs’ for the year. We thought we’d join in the fun by choosing our own cultural highlights of 2011. We’ll print them over the next three days, starting today with our choices of book, film and theatre. The descriptions come from the BOP staff member who nominated them.
Books
Book of the year by a former BOP employee: Fold by Tom Campbell
Tom’s first novel is a tale of male friendships steadily coming apart over the poker table. Published in early summer, it won good reviews from some of our most distinguished literary journals (the TLS, Metro) and collected several five-star raves on Amazon, not all of which were written by Tom’s friends. In a double triumph, Tom also wrote this blog’s most popular post of the year (see here), for which many thanks.
Book of the year by anybody else: Snowdrops by A.D. Miller
An intelligent, atmospheric thriller about a thirtysomething English lawyer dangerously out of his depth in post-communist Moscow.
Runner-up: Sunset Park by Paul Auster
Films
A mixed bag this year, like most years, but we found some films we liked.
Film of the year (drama): The Skin I Live In (directed by Pedro Almodovar, starring Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya).
Almodovar back to his best: this film is a stylish, thrilling and disturbing exploration of identity.
Runner-up: Hanna(directed by Joe Wright, starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana and Lady Mary from Downton Abbey).
A modern fairytale disguised as a Euro action thriller, Hanna also manages to meld road movie and comedy into the mix to great effect.
Documentary film of the year: TT3D: Closer to the Edge (directed by Richard de Aragues)
A 3D documentary about participants in the Isle of Man TT, the Guardian was bang on in saying: “What could have been a pretty dull film just for motorbike fans and devotees of the Isle of Man TT race, achieves real human interest and excitement”. The crashes are spectacular and heart-wrenching. A British film better than The King’s Speech.
Runner-up: 12 Angry Lebanese (directed by Zeina Daccache)
Maybe not the best film of the year, but a moving one: a documentary about the power of the arts.
Theatre
Our choices here reflect the increasingly hard to categorise nature of theatrical performance – mixing styles and art-forms to achieve its impact.
Water, at the Tricycle theatre, Kilburn.
Created by David Farr and the experimental theatre company Filter, Water was immersive, cinematic and moving (making it a good year for Farr as he also popped up as co-writer of Hanna).
Dance Marathon by bluemouth inc., at the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh.
Interactive performance event that had the audience dancing for four hours non-stop. A feat of endurance, the joy of watching people dance, and exploring your own boundaries: how far can you go without collapsing before time is up?
Common Sounds: Touching the Void by Rambert Dance Company, the London Contemporary Orchestra and the NeoFuturist Collective, at the former Commonwealth Institute, Kensington.
Part of the InTRANSIT festival, Common Sounds was an intense two-and-a-half-hour 'site-responsive theatre experience' that included modern dance, installations, theatre, and a beautiful interpretation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.
Amsterdam Fringe Festival
Now in its seventh year, this was an eye-opening mix of theatrical anarchy and creative explosions – more than 500 performances from all over the world held in nightclubs and theatres, on the streets, in living rooms and even in a swimming pool. And all held together (in terrible weather) by excellent organisation and endless invention.
Tomorrow we'll make our TV, art and music choices. We'd love to hear what your favourites were too.
BOP Consulting specialises in understanding the economic and social impacts of culture and the creative industries. We were established in 1997 and are based in London and Edinburgh.
We are always happy to hear from people interested in our work or in the items posted in this blog. Please visit our main website (see below), email Chris Gibbon at contact@bop.co.uk, or ring us on +44 (0)207 253 2041.
