Free Thinking

Add your comment to this debate

Please add your comments to Jude Kelly's lecture 'We need intimacy more than ever in today's globalised world.'
Did you change your position on this subject because you heard a new point of view?

A selection of comments will be published here.

Andy Bungay
Jude's thesis and the solutions she proposes are in many ways vital and beautiful. But in seeking to achieve more comfortable self-openness and oppenness to experience some dimsensions can be missed by culturally designated space. Jude was asked a question by an office manager about how culturally unmotivated people could be stimulated to feel a part of cultural events. I was reminded of the idea of 'culture' as a personal headspace as well as a public shared element-this came up for me in some therapist training I did. Nurture of this seems to require some notion of usefulness. Compare this with public cultural space where often there are few common-or-garden focal points -cum- useful entities: pub, post office, decent food at rational prices. For all its preserved history, the planners have made Greenwich, for example, a fairly useless and traffic-clogged place whose provenenace as a social centre is reduced to a couple of chilly benches on the cobb. Its themed happy , or effusive, but most people I saw there at the weekend were kvetsching.All too often we reduce the potential of urban space with a warped view of what is cultural , which is in fact very impersonal. This I think is what an office worker thinks when theyr'e told to do their bit for a cultural capital-it could feel like Swedish drill without the ensemble feel. There again, Jude is working with a city whose careening history and sense of piss-take (which authentically of course embraces high seriousness)will continue grab us by the scruff of the zeitgeist.