Balancing act

 
Hay is all about getting the balance right: a festival that will appeal to children as well as adults and certainly this year there is plenty for all ages.
 
There is an alternative festival taking place called How the Light Gets In, a mixture of philosophy and music. Somehow we never quite make it because the bus into town – Hay book festival takes place in a field- no longer stops near their venue. This is deliberate because the two festivals do not speak to each other, the established one fear the new upstart will pinch their customers and they have no intention of dropping them off outside their door.
 
Heard a fascinating talk on the history of the visual arts in Wales by Peter Lord. The consensus of opinion is that Wales has no visual art history; something that Lord debunks for the simple reason the country has no art historians. He blames the art colleges for this because there is no teaching of art history.
 

I suspect though the politics of art in Wales is riven with internal strife because at the end of Peter Lord’s talk when the debate was thrown open to the audience, not one hand shot up, something I have never seen happen in Hay before. Finally one man did ask one question. And that was it.