text: Dave Harte: Birmingham should drop aiming for big and just be the best - birminghampost Administrator - Business Live
  Dave Harte: Birmingham should drop aiming for big and just be the best
  Last week's regular family swim at the wonderful Tiverton Road pool in Selly Oak was enlivened by the presence of an arts festival taking over part of the building for a film show.
  Later that same day there was poetry in a local laundrette and open-air singing in Cotteridge Park by the CBSO Community Choir.
  'Art Soak' was a one-day arts festival taking place in the suburbs that make up Selly Oak constituency.
  It was modest in scale, relied heavily on the support of volunteers and was altogether fabulous.
  It managed to do that thing that Birmingham seems scared of doing: not be the biggest.
  The combination of us being the largest local authority in Europe but the second city in the UK seems to leave council officers and local politicians rather conflicted.
  The tiresome 'don't shout loud enough' rhetoric that comes from senior city figures masks a lack of imagination.
  We can see that lack of imagination played out every year in Artsfest, the artistic equivalent of the end of year school play.
  Artsfest exists for two reasons.
  Firstly, so it can be pointed at and described as 'big'. It's bigness can then be referred to by incoming/outgoing politicians as they cite evidence of Birmingham's ambition to continue to be big for the sake of being big.
  The second reason is shopping. It boosts visitors to the city centre who spend money in the chain stores that make our big city centre the same as everybody else's.
  I know many arts organisations who resent the three-line whip culture that exists around Artsfest and who would be glad to see the back of it.
  So how about the Art Soak model instead?
  How about we bring the arts to West Heath and Kingstanding?
  To their community centres and swimming pools?
  To their laundrettes and leafy parks?
  How about we just focus on the being innovative, interesting, engaging and community-minded on a more human scale.