Stuart MacBride: www.stuartmacbride.com
The business of being arty. I could start this column by quoting numbers at you, like the fact the arts and creative industries contribute £4.6 billion to the Scottish economy every year, or that it employs more than 73,000 people, or that it generates exports of £2.9bn, but I won’t.
I won’t even bang on about how Creative Scotland costs the taxpayer only £38.9 million (which, compared to that £4.6bn figure, is a bit of a bargain). Because I don’t need to tell you this stuff, you’re bright people, you know it already.
So, instead of banging on about all that, I’m going to try to make the case for the arts being key to Aberdeen’s continued prosperity.
The oil industry isn’t going to be around forever – not only has the price taken a plummet, climate scientists say we’ve got to stop burning the stuff unless we’re all planning on evolving gills and webbed feet.
It’s time to grasp the roustabout by the unmentionables and get something in place that will keep our heads above the rising waters. After all, Edinburgh doesn’t have an oil industry and it seems to have avoided descending into a post-apocalyptic cannibal dystopia. What it does have, are the arts. That and the slightly funky aroma of soggy Weetabix. But let’s focus on the arts side of things.
In 2013, we put in a bid to make Aberdeen the European Capital of Culture. Hurrah! We didn’t make the shortlist. Not hurrah! The judges said our city’s “artistic and cultural expertise” was “limited” and we didn’t have a “wow factor” or a “coherent vision” and that our hair looked funny. And we smelled (I may have made those last two things up).
Dundee, on the other hand, did make the shortlist. What? Dundee? How could Dundee get on the list and not us? We’re much better than old Dundee, with its concert halls and its new V&A Design Museum (even if it does look like a crashed spaceship) and its massive redevelopment programme and its acclaimed Repertory Theatre.
But the sad truth is: Dundee deserved to be shortlisted, we didn’t.
Since then, we’ve tried to do better, sometimes successfully, like the new Granite Noir festival, and sometime less so – the art gallery redevelopment springs to mind, does a double backflip and faceplants into the carpet then lies there groaning and swearing for at least another seven months – but we’re trying. The thing is, we need to do more. Much more. Remember the good old days when we had a regular book festival of our own, before it died a death, then got reanimated as a small part of May Festival? Remember those days, when we thought literature was important enough to have a festival of its very own?
We can do better. We should do better. And we’re going to do better, because Aberdeen deserves better. And if we get it right, we’ll have something to fall back on while we’re evolving those gills.