Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Creative Economy

I went to a meeting in Portland today for the promotion of arts in Portland. It was hard to know what hat to wear when I got there. Everyone was talking creative economy. I wore my listening hat.
As an artist who has essentially failed at making art my job I learned a lot from this exercise. There were people there who spoke on everything from sustainable to housing to graffiti walls and back again.
representatives from all local business sectors spoke on marketing and their role as promoters. Organizations spoke on how they could showcase creative people and promote the issues of that group of Portland.
Each of the three sectors, the artists, the organizations, and the businesses
were sent off to think groups for a bit. The one I went to was the artists group. We generated 45 ideas that all sought to solve the Portland art world's problems. It was great to hear a congregate of artists hash out the details usually spoken of at the city meetings. Totally foreign language for us. It was quite refreshing to hear how much support we have in our numbers. When the groups reconvened they had just started getting into it. The small groups were and are a real starting point for Portland interested in having a creative economy. The amount of time we were given to express our thoughts was a stipend. It can only be supplemented by continued meetings refining all the notions we generated.