Evolver Prize

 Despite my previously declared indifference – indeed, positive hostility – towards competitions, I confess I got bitten by the competitive bug when my casually-submitted Royal Academy entry in 2017 proved so successful (and, ah, lucrative).  As a result, I now keep an eye out for the sort of open entry submissions where my sort of work might stand a chance of getting a showing and even a few sales. Why not?

Last year I spotted the Evolver Prize, a competition to design the front cover of a future issue of Evolver, "the Wessex Arts & Culture Guide", a really useful "what's on in Wessex" publication that I had come across in a Dorset gallery. The winner would get £1000 (no, really) and the top 50 entries shown in an exhibition. Naturally, I submitted an entry and, although I didn't win, I was selected for the exhibition. Result!

Sadly, Covid has meant the exhibition is being shown in virtual form only, from 6th January to 6th March, but it has been done rather well, and you can see it here. It shouldn't be too hard for regular visitors to spot my contribution.

It goes without saying that Covid has trashed the hopes, expectations, employment, and earnings of anyone connected with the arts and entertainment world. I don't have the figures to hand, but "the arts" – considered broadly to include music and theatre – contribute many times more to the national economy than a tiny, almost entirely symbolic industry like fishing. And yet Brexit talks went to the wire over fishing rights, and failed completely to agree the sort of "passport" that would enable, say, musicians to tour in Europe. 

On which subject, I heard a brilliant phrase coined on Friday morning. The bass player of Radiohead, Colin Greenwood, was being interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme about the cancellation (yet again) of the Glastonbury Festival. He talked about the absolute necessity for many months of advance notice and planning in order to organise a successful band tour or festival, and how the last-minute approach to decision-making and legislation of the Johnson government – as evidenced by their handling of the fishing industry – made this impossible. Hence all the cancellations. He then said, "We seem to be governed by essay crisis at the moment".

Government by essay crisis! I love that: it encapsulates so neatly the kind of casual, reluctant, over-confident, late-night, last-minute approach that Johnson and his half-baked crew take to their meddling in our lives, and also exemplifies the kind of person who seems to get involved in senior Tory politics. Essay crises are not restricted to the ancient universities, of course, but it's a very Oxbridge syndrome, resulting from a combination of the need to submit two or more essays a week in tutorials with a conviction in one's own capacity to deliver them to an adequate standard with minimal effort. Which is fine when it comes to your own undergraduate studies, but not when it comes to other people's lives and livelihoods.