The Arts are the traditional economy, stupid (leave the budget allocation alone)
October 1, 2010 Slashing Arts budgets is the first thing every government in economic trouble does, which is a bit bass-ackwards because the economies of the future will be driven by a convergence of digital technology and traditional economy (maths, science). Digital? What’s that got to do with arts? It’s simple: there isn’t anything that you do online that isn’t highly graphical or that doesn’t require a great deal of planning by someone with a background in arts. Digital technology is communication.
I’m making the rounds to the party conferences for the ’21 Hours Experiment.’ Today I found myself at a NESTA fringe event at the Labour Party Conference entitled, ‘Britain: Creative Highway or Dead End?’
One of the panelists was Ian Livingstone, one of the godfathers of Britain’s digital games industry. He made a simple but important point:
When parents think about their children’s education, from which school to enroll them in, to enrolling them in extra curricular courses, they often won’t make the investment (either in financial allocation or time) in arts pursuits because they don’t realize that skills like planning and designing digital games are transferable. Livingstone said it’s much the same with governments in that they fail to realize just how much potential the digital games industry has to earn real revenue for HM Treasury now that games have gone from simply products to being services as well. He cited Farmville and Second Life, as having thriving online economies in digital goods-- something that no one would have thought of several years ago.