Some of our local artists and craftspeople still feel strongly about what they continue to believe was a missed opportunity to effectively market the local art and craft industry on the global stage provided by the 2007 Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean. Those who hold to this view make two central points; first, that the local and regional art and craft sectors ought to have had much more control over the marketing of their products which control, as it turned out, was tightly retained by the organisers of the cricketing event and which left most of the producers here in Guyana hopelessly unable to meet with the demanding conditionalities that could have caused their products to secure the title of official Cricket World Cup souvenir.
The second point that they make is that given the substantive underdevelopment of the local art and craft industry neither the government nor the corporate community ever really sought to do as much as they could to help local art and craft producers take full advantage of the marketing opportunity offered by Cricket World Cup.
This newspaper is certainly aware of approaches that were made to local commercial banks that were set aside presumably because the people who made those approaches were simply not in a position to offer the banks the assurances that they were seeking; and when those approaches failed they expected that the magnitude of the event offered more than enough justification for government to step into the breach. They feel that this did not happen, at least not to any discernable extent.
It appears from conversations with some of the artists and craftspeople who attended this week’s forum at the Cara Lodge sponsored by the Ministry of Tourism that the missed Cricket World Cup opportunity has been a much bigger issue than we may have thought particularly since some of those people who tried to take advantage of the event and failed – and even lost money in the bargain – believe that another comparable opportunity is unlikely to come again in a hurry. They have a point since replicating the kind of audience that Cricket World Cup provided will take many more millions than we can afford.
Local artists and craftspeople, however, appear not to have given up on trying to create viable economic ventures out of their respective talents and the sense of both enthusiasm and optimism evinced at the Cara Lodge forum this week was both heartening and deserving of both official and corporate attention and meaningful response.
There are no reliable estimates of the potential contribution of the local art and craft sector to the national economy. However, what is already known is that the talents of our local artists and crafts people can help market Guyana globally in a manner that can bring significant economic spinoffs. Certainly, there is both an opportunity and an international market for the emergence of a genre of local art and craft that evolves around the contemporary theme of the environment and climate change which can serve as an entirely appropriate creative support mechanism for the pursuits of President Bharrat Jagdeo in seeking to make the case for carbon credits.
The available evidence suggests that the creative talents of some of our local artists and craftspeople have already turned in the direction of the theme of the environment and one would hope that the government, particularly, and the corporate community would, in this instance, recognize the role the art and craft industry can play in foreign policy and will finally begin to pay more attention and give more meaningful support to the sector.
There is room, for example, for the parallel promotion of art and craft that embraces rainforest and environmental themes as part of the broader promulgation of the climate change thrust so that one form of communication serves to reinforce the other. It would have been more than useful, for example, if the visiting Heads of Government for the 30th Caricom Summit could have been exposed to a local exhibition of art and craft that spoke particularly to the theme of climate change since such a display, apart from providing a potential market for the artists and craftspeople would have served as an altogether appropriate reinforcement of what has now become by far the President’s primary foreign policy preoccupation. That, too, was a missed opportunity.
This week’s gathering of artists and craftspeople from the far-flung regions of the country was intended to enable the creation of a three-year strategic plan which, apart from its preoccupation with money and marketing will hopefully address the more strategic considerations of how art and craft can continue to reinvent itself to stay abreast of the global agenda and, in the process, to render itself more appealing, more relevant and more marketable.
The artists and craftspeople have conceded their limitations and have made it clear that they are in need of more official and corporate support while remaining unfettered by any constraints that would rein in their creativity.
Seizing the moment requires that there be a radical shift in the traditional approach to treating with the local art and craft industry. It has to be more than a sideshow to substantive events designed to distract and delight or, as has been the case for many years, a convenient appendage to GUYEXPO. How to infuse the art and craft sector into the mainstream of social, cultural and economic life in order to ensure that both the creations and the creators get the credit, the recognition and the credit that they deserve is an issue that still languishes on the back burner of the national development agenda. It ought not to be left there any longer.
