Europe gets out the vote – for creativity

The European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 may be drawing to a close pretty soon, but the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Education and Culture, which has been implementing the program and its many multinational collaborations, keeps coming up with engaging ideas.

One of the latest is a photography contest that anyone in the world who has access to a computer can vote on. Just click here to register and vote for the pic of your choice. 

It’s mindblowing that we’ve reached a point where nearly everyone can contribute to a single creative activity with the click of a button. Maybe someday, we’ll all be able to compose together what would literally be a piece of world music.

Check out FestLab – and see what’s on the slab

In the United States, we have incubators for artists and arts projects of all kinds, from dance and theater to popular music and digital design. Why not an incubator for festivals?

Europe has one. It’s called the FestLab for Creativity and Innovation.

Set up by the European Festivals Association as part of the European Commission’s European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 - a multinational effort to encourage awareness of the personal, social and economic benefits of creativity and innovation and promote better education and training in related skills – FestLab aims to draw attention to the important role of festivals in creative social and cultural processes and help individual festivals fulfill their artistic missions.    

The European Year site currently features a conversation with Ruta Pruseviciene, executive director of the 13-year-old Vilnius Festival, which has resisted catering to popular tastes and trends and set its own artistic agenda. We all need to learn how to do that better, no matter what creative enterprise we’re developing.