The Writing's On The Wall- Banksy Inspires Your Life Your Style

I’ll be rooting for the graffiti artist Banksy to win an Oscar tomorrow for his documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop. I find his work on outdoor walls inspiring. Don’t worry, I haven’t bought a hooded jacket and a spray can of paint. The streets of Winchester are safe, from me at least.
It’s more about the way he thinks. He shares with great artists of the past the ability to look at an everyday object or scene and find in it something meaningful that the rest didn’t see.
It’s the same kind of eye that enabled Michelangelo to look at a piece of marble that had baffled even other artists and see in it a sculpture of David or Picasso to look at an old bike’s saddle and handlebars and see a goat’s head.
Like Southampton last year, Los Angeles, home of the Oscars, is currently benefiting from Banksy’s imaginative street art, such as the wall of a burnt out building that featured a smiling Charlie Brown with a petrol can and a cigarette.
My favourite is a large poster for a Las Vegas hospitality company which he has transformed into a scene of debauchery featuring a drugged up Minnie Mouse and a drunken Mickey cavorting with the bikini clad woman of the original advertisement. It says a lot about the gap between people’s fantasies and the reality of the high life.
One of my best Christmas presents was a book of Banksy’s art called Wall and Piece. It has given me a lot of inspiration in my work as a retailer. What he and other artists demonstrate is that, by taking the everyday and transforming it, you can create much more attention grabbing, emotionally engaging displays or websites. And if you can do it with humour all the better.
I don’t claim the windows of Your Life Your Style are great art but, when our designer Lyn recently positioned a little paperweight mouse peeking out of a faux fur slipper, she created something that was more than just a display of two products, and that at least nodded in the direction of artists like Banksy.

This article appeared in the Southern Daily Echo

Creating Art Out Of Craft Is A Special Gift

To produce great art, an artist needs to understand thoroughly the medium in which they work in order to be able to use it to communicate. The medium could be words, oil paint or a piano- or the mind in the case of conceptual art. It’s not usually cloth or glass.

Craft works are often not seen as great art because they have a practical purpose; but when you come across someone who is so skilled in their craft that they can use it to create emotional responses, I have no doubt it is Art.
We have works from two such artistic craftspeople on sale in our Winchester shop Your Life Your Style and online at yourlifeyourstyle.co.uk.

Jo Downs works in fused glass. Her supreme craftsmanship results in astonishingly rich colours but beyond that, the artistic use of shapes, textures and colour combinations is emotionally engaging, be it a heart within a heart or an abstract impression of a Cornish beach through various seasons.

Likewise Margo Selby produces colourful geometric abstract designs which are converted to three dimensional fabric. This in turn is spun by English mills to provide the fabric for stunning bags, scarves and cushions. Like all great art, the form and the content are one. The results work on an esoteric level way beyond simply being a beautiful accessory.

Like any work of art, they are a joy to possess or to give to someone you care about. Click on this link to get an idea of what these special gifts are like.

Do Cheap Tickets Build Audiences?

The Sun newspaper recently ran an offer that enabled readers to see Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera House in best seats for £12- something of a bargain since my local arthouse cinema is charging nearly £20 to see it on a screen by live link. This was one of many initiatives over the years by the Hamlyn Trust to encourage the less well off and the unconverted to enjoy ballet and opera- or to put it another way, break down these art forms’ elitist image. This is not dissimilar to the National Theatre’s £10 ticket offers.

I would love to know the level of success because my own experience is that these kind of offers tend to be taken up by existing fans happy to get a cheap ticket or by people willing to spend say £10 but not the normal price. Either way, the audience is not significantly increased.

I don’t doubt that price is an issue for many people considering attending ballet and opera but I don’t think it’s a case of saying, “Try it and then you’ll see it’s worth £50.” If people can afford those prices, the chances are they will give it a try when they’re ready.

Which leaves us with the intractable problem- how do you diversify the audience for the arts? Or to put it another way, how can you justify public subsidies for art forms that are only enjoyed by the well-off middle classes?

My suggestion is a national registration scheme that gives people a discount card if they can prove their income is below a certain level. For many this would simply mean showing that you are in receipt of some kind of benefit or family credit, for others it might mean providing proof of earnings. Then all subsidised art forms should be obliged to make 10% of their seats available at a realistically cheap price (compensated if necessary by raising the full prices) on a first come first served basis to those in possession of a discount card.

Sex Sells Theatre Tickets

An article in the Daily Telegraph explains in fascinating detail how David Pugh and his partner Daffyd Rogers financed Equus and their many other theatrical successes and occasional failures. However it says little about the part David’s marketing skill has played in his achievements. I have met no other producer who combines theatrical knowledge with marketing flair in quite the way David does.


David’s decision to change the cast of Art every twelve weeks was a clever way of keeping the show in the news, as was the special celebrity guest each night in The Play What I Wrote. When he brought Rebecca starring Nigel Havers to my then theatre, he marketed it with a brilliant black and white photo (by Lord Lichfield) of Havers looking wistful on a beach. David gave me a framed version of the poster when we broke the British box office record for a play. It’s the only theatre poster I have in my office.



The image used for Equus was just as striking, featuring a bare chested Daniel Radcliffe whose lower body morphed into a horse’s head. The announcement of the West End run was accompanied by studio photos of a nearly naked Daniel. They were entirely in keeping with the sexual themes in the play but the image of a sexy Harry Potter gained coverage in virtually every national paper.

Shocking News

I was discussing with one of my clients ways in which they could get more media coverage. At one time sex, nudity and swearing were surefire ways of whipping up some media controversy. Nowadays these things pass without notice.

I remember being disappointed when the appearance of The Vagina Monologues at my theatre a few years ago failed to raise even an eyebrow, let alone a green ink letter. A few days ago Wedding Belles on Channel 4 offered us necrophilia, hard drug taking, gory murder and foul language and still didn’t make the headlines. Disappointing for us publicists, but at least artists can now get on with exploring human sexual activity without their efforts being viewed through the filter of shock.

On the other hand, religion is definitely worth a try if you want to get some media attention. You don’t even have to go out of your way to offend some Christians or Muslims- it seems they’re going out of their way to be offended. The latest is the banning of an exhibition of a naked Jesus made of chocolate that was due to be displayed in a New York gallery. The Catholic League For Religious And Civil Rights did the deed in this case. I’d never heard of Cosimo Cavallero before but now I’ve seen his website and think some of his work looks quite impressive.

Let’s be thankful there are still people around who can guarantee the arts a bit of publicity.

If you're going to do it, do it properly

Last Monday saw the launch of Celebratio, an event management and ticketing system from SecureTicket for which The Lewis Experience has been providing PR and marketing support. What I like about the people at SecureTicket (apart from the fact that they're very nice) is that they realise the danger of the false economy.

So they chose the Cafe Royal for the launch- a top class, sophisticated venue right in the heart of London, not some anonymous hotel on the fringes. They got a well known celebrity (Maggie Philbin, the BBC's Face Of Technology, pictured with Rashid Qajar, chief executive of SecureTicket) to host it instead of relying on their excellent but unknown selves. They served champagne not cheap sparkling wine. They commissioned a short comedy film and hired a live band, rather than simply offering a power point presentation.

The result was a well-attended evening and potential clients going away with an image of a company that doesn't just promise great things but actually delivers.

If you want to know more about Celebratio, which by the way is Latin for 'audience', visit the website secureticket.biz.

I Don't Want To Be A Producer

I was sorry to see that The Producers has closed in London after two years. 920 performances is respectable but nothing like the run of its Broadway cousin, now in its seventh year. I’ve seen both versions and found them equally slick and funny.

Lyn Gardner was backstage on the last night and wrote an informative piece in The Guardian. She blames the size of the venue (Theatre Royal Drury Lane has 2200 seats) for its relatively early demise. I agree that filling all the seats in a large theatre can be a problem. I always felt Disney’s Beauty And The Beast deserved a much longer London run but the huge Dominion did for it. Well established productions like Phantom or Les Mis often move to smaller venues- and the producers of The Producers did consider this- but early in a run production costs need to be paid back quickly and, when you’re talking about a multi-million pound musical spectacular, you can only hope to do this if you’re occupying a large theatre.

On the other hand, maybe a spoof on putting on a Broadway show doesn’t have the same appeal to British audiences as to Americans. We’ll have to see how well sales go for the superb Spamalot which covers similar ground.

Still, there’s always the tour. Those provincials who didn’t make the perilous trip to the capital now have the chance to enjoy The Producers nearer to home.

Why Market To People Who Aren't Interested?

You know all those Arts Council inspired initiatives to bring classical music, opera and ballet to a wider audience? Like doing more contemporary work or offering cheap tickets or putting on educational evenings. Do you think they work? A report from America suggests many audience development initiatives may be a waste of public funds.

The James S and John L Knight Foundation spent $13 million in ten years funding schemes to attract new audiences to 15 US Symphony Orchestras. What they found was that free concerts in more ‘accessible’ venues, putting the musicians in jeans or doing educational work, all failed to increase the number of tickets sold.

It’s not that people don’t like classical music. 60% of adults claimed they did, but fewer than 5% went to live concerts. These days classical music lovers prefer to listen to recordings or the radio. Free concerts attracted an audience but didn’t convert them into ticket buyers. It seems the vast majority don’t want to pay big money for a long concert in a large concert hall.

Is this so bad? Times do change and maybe we should accept change. Theatre and Popular Music has coped with the rise of cinema, television and recordings by providing audiences with large-scale spectaculars with a unique ‘wow’ factor and at the other end of the scale small-scale performances of unique intimacy.

Ballet, Opera and Classical Music have an audience and can appeal to newcomers who appreciate their qualities, but all the great ballets, operas and symphonies were written over a hundred years ago and, at least in live versions, they’re limited in their appeal to a 21st audience.

When I worked more with arts companies, it was frustrating to see them spend money on audience development projects that were clearly ‘hoops’ they were being put through to justify their funding, when I wanted to spend it on more marketing to the known audience. Get them to come more often and to spread the word.

I enjoy many pre-20th century works performed live and I’m grateful to the Arts Council for subsidising my pleasure. But I accept I’m in a small minority. Audience development projects are just guilt money because so much public funding is being used to provide entertainment for a well-heeled middle class elite.