European Capital of Culture
Just learned that there is such official title/event as the European Capital of Culture despite it started as early as 1985 (with Athens as the first). Both FreeDictionary and Wikipedia cite that
A number of European cities have used the City of Culture year to completely transform their cultural base and, in doing so, the way in which it is viewed internationally.
To transform one's own cultural base sounds ridiculous and terrible to me, regardless how complete it is. I hope it means the infrastructure rather than the tradition. Or this European Union project is just another homogenising machine?
Anyway, the direction of having art going public like the project "Metamorphoses" in Lille 2004 justifies the statement and makes it a bit different from any other international festival. All the more I think artists shall get into the community and have interaction with all walks of life. Of course we have already had too many provocative visuals on every inch of our buildings' facades, subway tunnels, taxis' doors and even the seats of the public transport. How does creativity of artists differ from those of the advertising agents?
After all, it's quite disappointing that there seems no education session for project of such scale, talking about "cultural base". Perhaps at least something like the Discover project of Liverpool Biennial coming soon?
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