I got a phone call last week saying that my first blog was "depressing". That was repeated to me at the weekend.
Why was it depressing? Because I said that I didn't think there was any organised campaign to express the disquiet over Creative Scotland and its policies, funding, strategy and so on.
"It was dispiriting to read that," one person said. I felt it was true. Yes, there are lots of dissenting voices, and many opinions on Creative Scotland, but no cohesive voice, and certainly no defined campaign, counter-weight or plan.
Well, that could be changing now. As we report today, there will be an open meetings of artists at Waverley Gate in Edinburgh on October 26. It will be held in a space in the Creative Scotland offices but is not organised or chaired by them, although it's pretty likely someone from Creative Scotland will be present.
Kenneth Fowler, the body's head of communications, wrote an interesting blog last week and having talked to him about it, he seems genuinely interested in improving the dialogue between the arts community, artists, and companies, and Creative Scotland.
He has some intriguing ideas which will be further developed in the coming months. But for many, communication is the least of the problems: they have issues with Creative Scotland itself, what it is, what it does, and what it wants to do, not just what it says.
The writer and director Jen McGregor has organised the Edinburgh meeting, and Roanne Dods, a former director of the Jerwood Foundation as well as being involved in many other cultural things, is organising a similar meeting for anyone who wants to attend on October 31 at the Tramway, Glasgow.
Meeting Ms McGregor this week, it seems clear the plan, and the hope, is that these meetings are the first of many. They could become semi-permanent fixtures in the coming years, forums for discussions between artists that they then feed back to Creative Scotland and the other powers-that-be.
"We don't have to wait to be consulted," she said. "Our power does not lie in Creative Scotland, it lies in each other."
The Edinburgh meeting will be an "open space" affair, while the Glasgow meeting will probably have speakers and a series of questions to consider.
Creative Scotland have been invited to both, and Fiona Hyslop, culture secretary, will also be invited to Edinburgh. More meetings should happen outside the central belt, too.
Are these meetings the beginnings of artists getting organised, I asked Ms Dods? "I would say so," she said.
In this view, more open discussion and debate can only be a healthy thing. For one, it takes the pressure off those who wish to "put their heads above the parapet", something that - for good reasons - not everyone is prepared to do.
Hopefully at these meetings people will feel free to say what they like, without fear of future funds being in doubt, or earning the label of "troublemakers" at Creative Scotland or elsewhere.
The Government and Creative Scotland didn't want the funding body to be a noisy news story this year but, overall, it has turned into one. They cannot wish the issues away.
Maybe these meetings are the first step towards a solution to problems of both substance and presentation that are not going to disappear anytime soon.
The Turner Prize exhibition opened at Tate Britain this week, where it runs until January 6. The short listed artists Spartacus Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Paul Noble and Elizabeth Price have made what looks like an absorbing (and particularly time consuming, apparently) exhibition and I look forward to seeing it in person in a couple of weeks.
Luke Fowler, who makes ruminative films, is of course based in Glasgow and, if he wins the prize, would be the fourth Scottish artist in a row to win, and the seventh since 1996. The show features his latest film on the radical psychiatrist RD Laing, All Divided Selves. His more recent work, The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott, about EP Thompson and the Workers' Educational Association, is also a wonderful work.
The prize exhibition was at the Baltic in Gateshead last year, when Martin Boyce won. It is becoming increasingly odd that Scotland has not hosted the prize and its exhibition. There was some talk, last year, of Glasgow making a concerted effort to land the exhibition, but not much since.
I joked on Twitter that if Fowler won, the prize should be renamed the Glasgow Prize and permanently re-located north of the border, to which one artist correctly pointed out the award is "not Eurovision". Point taken.
However, one year's recognition of the extraordinary impact of Scotland, Scottish art schools and artists on the premiere contemporary art prize does not seem too outlandish an idea.
The Turner Prize is going to Derry next year. Hopefully for 2014 it can come to Scotland.
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