Show latest news, more from December 2006.
EMBRACING THE RIGHT TO ART
The Glasgow City Council is the first local authority in the UK to become a signatory to a campaign aiming to make access to art and visual culture a right of all UK citizens. REALISE your right to art is founded on the belief that everyone has the right to participate in culture and to enjoy the arts, as enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. A long-term initiative aimed at bringing visual culture into peoples’ lives and influencing public policy and the political debate, its list of signatories extends to artists and art workers from all shades of the spectrum, from Sir Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, to Baroness Lola Young and award-winning architect David Adjaye. Councillor John Lynch, executive member for cultural and leisure services at Glasgow City Council, signed the document on Saturday 11 November at the Gallery of Modern Art. “REALISE your right to art expresses values compatible with Glasgow’s cultural strategy, elaborating the role of visual arts, artists and galleries in society,” said Mark O’Neill, Director of Museums and Galleries for Glasgow. “It sees art, like other aspects of culture, as integral to the development of a vibrant communal life, a high-performing economy and a more socially just society. Glasgow City Council is committed to the programme’s cultural entitlements, (which) places them in a UK context and challenges other local authorities to follow suit.” The campaign aims to put art at the heart of society and to build a new cultural social landscape in which everyone would have the opportunity to make art and enjoy the very best in art, visual and design literacy would be recognised as an essential component of personal development, and high quality design would be a feature of all new communities and regeneration schemes. “(There is) plenty of evidence that the visual is a vital component of life in this country, and a crucial component of the future of this country, not just in terms of a knowledge economy or the creative economy, but in terms of our intellectual and spiritual welfare as we move forward into the 21st century,” Sir Nicholas Serota said at the launch of REALISE in London last November. For more information about REALISE, CLICK HERE.
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