I had a nice chat with Matt Price at the Blink magazine launch party on Friday. Matt is a writer and editor who specialises in The Arts and who recently curated the Binary Oppositions show which took a selection of Birmingham-based artists to a gallery in Brescia, Italy along with an anthology CD of local musicians put out by Static Caravan. (There’s a good article on 4Talent which I’d recommend reading about this rather innovative scheme.)

If Matt has a plan, and if Binary Oppositions is part of that plan, then it runs a little like this. During the Young British Artists movement a number of Midlands artists such as Gillian Wearing felt they had to move to London in order to promote and sell their work because Birmingham didn’t have the infrastructure in place. What Matt’s discovered is that the current generation don’t want to move to London because they find Birmingham to be a good (and cheap) place to work. However there isn’t an established art market here to support them financially so they still need to have their work represented elsewhere. Binary Oppositions, being a collaboration with the Arts Council along with Birmingham City Council and Advantage West Midlands, was an attempt to rectify that by developing a system whereby the artists can remain based here but sell worldwide. But the long term plan is still to have everything coming out of Birmingham.

This ties nicely into the launch of Blink which contains articles about Birmingham artists, professionally written, edited and published in a slick looking package. Matt sees this writing about the local scene as a vital cog in the machine that gets art from creation to sale. In short, Birmingham not only needs to encourage a community of artists. It also needs to encourage a community of people to write about them.

As you might expect, all this got me thinking. The Custard Factory website has a few basic requirements - blog, events listings, tenants directory, etc - but beyond that it can be anything at all. And given that there are a fair few artists based in the studios here it makes sense that the website should contribute to raising their profile. There’s no reason this site can’t provide a relatively high-profile venue for those who want to develop their arts writing or to those organisations who have taken on the role of promoting Birmingham’s arts scene.

This is still a while off. Laying the foundations of this site is going to take a few months but this is the thinking I’m doing about what the end result might be. And it wouldn’t just be the arts that get this treatment. Once the structure is in place we can cover anything that comes under the Custard Factory remit, which is pretty much everything really.

(Blink is published by Fused who are based in the Custard Factory. You can pick it up for free all over the city.)