Leafing through the glossy ensemble photography of Vanity Fair – you know the sort, pages packed with film industry scions, trussed in taffeta or insouciant in Armani – I often dreamt of being part of a power-player collective myself, making our mark on the British contemporary art world with our individual style. Little did I know how much thought, care and planning go into such things.
There is a dearth of deaf arts managers because everyone else wants to be an artist! But as certain deaf artists have found to their cost, arts collectives involve far more than initiative. You also need skills in project management, planning, negotiation, budgeting and book-keeping, diplomacy, sustainability, teamwork, networking and marketing – the kind of skills that, in fact, would be constituted as business skills and thus considered anathema to any artist – never mind deaf artists.
