Vision On

Same question

I keep asking myself, Why am I writing this blog?

Part of the answer, weirdly, is coming from the renewed focus it's given me for the Illuminations website -- and for the News and Blog pages there. As the latter indicates, we're moving towards shifting the whole site towards being built around a blog, and that seems to be a really strong focus for the future of the company. This more personal space perhaps has a place alongside that.

I've been interesting by reflections from Charlotte Higgins and (in interview) Alex Ross on their blogging, and on the ways they see the relationship developing between professional critics and blogs.

Why I write

I thought I might start this post with something like, "Regular readers might note..." But of course there are no regular readers. I have a fantasy that there may one day be such, but for the moment, like I suspect many blogs, these pages attract perhaps 10 or 12 hits a day. Which, among other things, has prompted me to try to scratch out some first thoughts about why, without any meaningful audience, I continue to post here -- and how I might shift what I'm doing in the coming weeks.

What's happening 2

Oh dear. More than a month and no posts. I have to do better, and while the weeks immediately after the last post were very busy, the last couple have been more normal, and my failure to post has been more to do with a block caused by the delay. So I'm breaking that with a simple update post, and then I'll endeavour to add some more substantial pieces in the next few days.

So...

Blog or doc?

The New York Times' Artsbeat is throwing the bloggers' arsenal at the unprecedented visit to North Korea of the New York Philharmonic and Lorin Maazel. In addition to text reporting and photos, there are slideshows, embedded video reports and audio excerpts.

It's an impressive collection of moment-to-moment coverage, but it begins to focus a question that is much preoccupying me at present: what place is there (if any) for the traditional linear arts documentary when we can have immediate access to a range of rich media like this. In the past, some weeks or months after the event, a polished film might have appeared on, say, the BBC detailing and assessing this striking moment of musical diplomacy. Such a production may indeed by underway, but it seems unlikely.

So are we any the poorer because such films have been supplanted by instant media? Other changes of course have contributed to the decline of considered cultural documentaries, but should we be concerned? Can we get what we want and need from a blog like Artsbeat -- or is this an only a relatively impoverished channel of thin content? Do we need the context and, crucially, the supplemental, extended experience that a good film documentary can offer?

Art of Faith online

Our Art of Faith blog for the Sky Arts series is beginning to take shape, with new reports and pictures from Paris and Chartres, Kairouan (above), and Cordoba and Toledo. I'm off to Delhi today to film the Taj Mahal and Fatephur Sikri, and Seb, Nonie and Ian go to Prague tomorrow, then Budapest and Istanbul.

This is the first time I've been involved in a full production blog and, for the moment, I'm very engaged by the process. It's also interesting, if demanding, to be developing my own blog alongside the production one. Plus it allows me to compare the Blogger toolkit with Typepad on which is created.

Hello

I've tried blogging once before -- and failed. That explains the date on the top of this post. So this is now another attempt, more than two years on from the first go. And these are some first, very brief notes about what I'm engaged in and what interests me.