What is ‘Open’ Art?
In current times ‘Open Art’ has a much wider meaning than an art competition in which anyone can submit their work. ‘Openness’ in this broader context is defined by organisations, groups and communities that embrace transparency, collaboration, sharing and free access. It has already been established in many other areas such as Open Innovation, Open Science, Open Space (meetings), Open Access (publishing), Open Data and Open Source (software). The Open movement has no exclusive membership and is neither club, cult or cabal.
OPen Art Lincs aims to embrace the wider ‘Open’ movement by building an art community across Lincolnshire in which any artist or art-lover can share their work, knowledge and experiences. This was achieved earlier through the publication of the book ‘What Inspires Art?’ in which 110 artists shared their stories on what moved them to create a particular piece of work*. More recently we have built on that through the publication of a monthly newsletter in which anyone can contribute; through public engagement with ‘Art Talks’ and workshops by specialists; and through the organisation of an annual open art exhibition in which anyone can submit their work. *(see: https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Inspires-Art-Kevin-Byron/dp/1399946811 )
Why OPAL?
The letters in bold in the OPen Art Lincs logo spell out OPAL and this symbolises the fundamental subjectivity in the immediate appreciation and assessment of art. Opal is a semi-precious stone that consists of many layers of tiny, closely-packed spheres of silica (ie sand). The shimmering colours that are observed when an Opal is viewed from different angles is due to the diffraction of light on the surface (rather like the hologram on a bank card). Two people looking at an Opal side-by-side will perceive different colours. By analogy our immediate subjective assessment of art is coloured by our own knowledge, experience, personal preferences and biases. Immediate impressions have their place when we view an exhibition, but this is not a reliable way of assessing art for selection in an exhibition. We need to go further and identify other aspects of the work with a more thoughtful and knowledge-based approach. This takes time, but if an artist is prepared to spend many hours creating and producing a piece of art, they deserve much more than an intuitive ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ in its assessment.
