Newsletters

Trying to tap into the lucrative grants market is not as easy as your would hope.

I subscribe to various newsletters from organisations like folly, the Arts Council and Voluntary Arts England.

But the complicated criteria you have to meet to justify getting an award or grant to carry out a project is worthy of a degree course itself. Form-filling MA or BA in Jargon.

The process is only surpassed in its abuse of the English language by the stupidity of English language used in actual submission guidelines.

Quite frankly, I'm beginning to think you need to be on drugs to understand the terminology these organisations use.

For example: Proposals are requested that explore mapping as it relates to survival, resistance, and gentrification. How do artists respond to it? How do these issues affect community? How can the internet or web-based technology be used to address these concerns?

And: The purpose of this open participation meeting is *to explore the relationship between digital networks and physical space: how new locative technologies are changing the way citizens perceive the physical and geographic space* (cellphones, Google Earth, GPS...) *and how these media are reorganizing civic communication and interaction* (from "geobrowsers" to the Local Web 2.0 or the "hiperlocal" journalism).

I even complained to Folly, who collate these commissions before sending them out in one big fat email.

So it was nice to read a plain English appeal for artistic work today.

"The Brighton Pebble Museum is curating a CD of pebble related music. For inclusion, please send your track to..."

Rolling Stones anyone?