On a lighter note from recent messages, Folly, the media company in Lancaster, added a little act of joy to their community media festival f.city, held earlier this year.

Mickaël Charbonnel and Chris Vanstone aka Humanbeans, two designers who style themselves as an advertising creative and design strategist respectively, set up a site What's Cooking Grandma?, which does exactly what is says on the packet. Innocent grandmas from all over Lancaster have been filmed knocking up their favourite recipes. The outcome is a moving image recipe book without Gordon Ramsey's ****ing diatribes or Nigella's gushing sugar and spice. This artsednews author is off to make twelve of Jackie's scones from the recipe featured on the front page.

The purpose of the project isn't at all clear save that it will engage lots of budding filmakers and their grandmas. Granddads don't seem to be included - a little subversion in the cause of gender equality is called for. Innocent ideas such as this - true community involvement with the tiniest fragment of art thrown in is welcomed.

Art educationalists should do projects like this from time to time. The valuing of moving image is clear. So to is the art of documentary making. No political or grand arts gestures of course - Brian Sewell wouldn't want to write about it. Could be a useful document of contemporary life. Time for a sequel - Grandma goes Clubbing would be good.

The current debates about English arts and education reveal much about cultural politics of the time. DfES is plain quiet about curriculum matters. Arts Council England treads its corporate plough with the launch of the Learning Outside the Classroom, the new great and good outfit Missions, Models Money publishes a state of the nation report on education in cultural institutions and the Royal Society for the Arts, Commerce and Industry ploughs its cash into a city academy in the Midlands:

After its first half a dozen busy and invasive years the Labour government seems to have turned attention from the curriculum to bigger political events such as city academies and what seems to many, the great journey of privatisation. QCA is taking a potentially radical review of central issues such as Key Stage Three learning but arts education features little in the grand thinking.  

Arts Council England has its Creative Partnerships project, working well in a limited number of localities but without significant messages and ill connected across the organisation. Learning outside the Classroom has the new fashion of a manifesto rather than a policy. It is shared with folk such as English Heritage and may have distant effect in focusing minds but looks distinctly unconnected to more strategic action at government level.

Mission. Models, Money is a curious organisation - a consortium of individual interests glued to some extent or another by interests in the Clore Fellowship. It looks like the confederations of interests that come together in any generation to take political power. Their paper Mission Accomplished is a partial but worthwhile walk through the education worlds of cultural organisations with key messages at tail end.

Perhaps the most perverse is the RCA's decision to pick up the threads of Opening Minds, its innovative and radical curriculum design project and apparently test them in the sponsorship of a city academy in Tipton. The problem is that RSA's members aren't being much informed about the project (the decision to go ahead was made without any prior discussion) and is subject to suspicions of political bouncing.

It does appear that arts (or is it cultural) education is being owned by everyone. Manifestos, policies, discussion papers, interest groups - the whole paraphernalia of a disconnected dialogue where leadership has been lost. 

“Black box” and “white cube” - in the arts, we bandy these about to mean two very different kinds of spaces.

A black box refers to a theatre space – dark, contained, flexible, experimental, in-the-background, technically sparse, (a)live. It brings to mind the experimental off-Broadway studios of the 60s and 70s, bearded men in polo necks doing monologues, “worthy” and “wacky” performances, earnestness…

A white cube refers to a gallery space – clean, bright, light, simple, neutral, literally and metaphorically a blank canvass. The phrase has been so adopted into the cultural firmament that it’s the name of one of the most famous contemporary art galleries in London (conceived and run by Jay Jopling, art dealer extra-ordinaire). (In)Famously, Martin Creed won the Turner Prize a few years ago for his lights flashing on and off in a white cube…

But hearing the phrases seemingly anew a couple of weeks ago, it struck me that both these places are: for experimentation and experience; for creating work and challenging perception; for providing physical and mental space to encounter ‘the other’; and for hosting and confining both the work and the viewer for the duration.

So similar, so different. Why have we placed these two spaces, indeed two artforms, at one of each end of a spectrum, made them seem so opposed, when in fact they have so much in common?

Armed with camera phones and a tape recorder, the Salford Star team sent a group of lads to the Lowry centre. "We won't last two minutes," was the teens' prediction.

"They've got to let you in - it's a public building, paid for by your parents ... of course they'll let you in," responded the Star. "They're talking all the time about how they want to reach out to 'young people in the community'..."

Here's what happened...

It's been a bit quiet round here of late - time of year I guess - so I thought I'd put up a picture of my post. Yep, that's right...

Actually it's the post-back pack from the Your Place or Mine? conference a few weeks back - a nice event "trick". You write down your thoughts or contacts or whatever on any of the scraps of paper, put them in the envelope and they post them back to you at a later date. Idea being that once we're back at our desks, the learning and sparks of things that inspired us at the time get lost under the mounds of paperwork (ahem). Point proved....