Council Tax can fuck off !!!

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Autumn / Winter Competition 2018

once again its got to that time of year when the supermarkets are flooding the shelves with pumpkins and all manner of plastic ghoul themed crap destined for landfill as soon as novemebr hits … and then of course the obsessive compulsive acquire'ers go into overdrive … on whats left of the high stree,t and of course on line!  Tinsel … I a sure boxes and boxes of the stuff are already clogging p shipping routes the world over … its a madness really and a far cry from its original point of intent !

I am sure that you are already aware that in my little home studios , productions are getting streamlined for the ' festive rush ' and indeed my own little workshops are feeling rather like santa's  this year , brimming with Dinosaurs and all manner of Palaeo things that I would have loved as a kid ….

and this year the Christmas / winter competitions should of course incorporate a little bit of a dinosaur giveaway !!

Lifesized handsculpted bass relief wall art 

so , as well a our usual like and share competition ( Like a artbyvaleriopage facebook post and share the shop page while tagging a friend - between October 31st 2018 and December 28th 2018 for your chance to win )  Holiday packages at both 'Artby Valerio's Art B&B in Amsterdam' and of course the' Artby Valerio's Art B&B in Cornwall' up for grabs … this year I will be doing a few little extra sketchbook pages that will be available through charity auction … as well as a dinosaur giveaway a little closer to Christmas …

so get your likes an shares out … tag friends and family tht might be interested in these awesome limited edition/ hand made/ hand signed originality driven giveaways from 'Artby Valerio's - The Arts Hole x '

original handrawn ' sketchbook pages ' framed accompanied by the limited release' got wood' illustrations 

Plymouth Art Weekender and the notion of a general strike ????

this s I suppose a little after thought from ' the Cornish art scene ' previous post !

so we have just had the so called Plymouth art weekender …..

and here is the thing ,so I was going on about silly little art collectives spread out all over the counties and each one full of ' handmade silver ' and 'decorative ceramics' or worse !!

the handmade silver as intricate and pleasing to the eye as some of it is , its all wholesale silver from fucking india or god knows where …. even though these two counties in particular sit on some substantial silver ore deposits , indeed you can wander over the mineral spoils of many of the old tin mines and find all manner of geological debris … including reasonable quantities of Galena ….

the ceramicists are all buying special ' artists quality ' materials, again whole sale from china or whatever just straight off of Etsy … exactly the same as the indian / Mexican silver !!

its bizarre to me quite what we manage to call a functioning economy in this country !!!

o.k so all of this cheap wholesale ' material ' is being shipped n from abroad , and the revenue that is noted as ' overheads ' are all directed out of the country … can any one see the flaw here ??
we have set things up very nicely for the agent of those commodities … but the producer of the original raw material ? or the practitioner that alters that raw material ??

this is exactly how the so called Plymouth art weekender works !!

look at the signage !!! PLYMOUTH ART WEEKENDER  …. and it is festooned with supporting logos of similarly scaled arrogance !!

the arts council / lottery funded / Plymouth city council / the royal academy ….. on and on it goes !! a load of government endorsed / government funded / government censored / government promoted bourgeois crap just posing as culture behind some logos

its a fuckin savage vantage for an independent anything these days … and as the age of madness rolls from the Reagan / thatcher years and on to bush / blair years  and straight through to where we are now …. right now !! the Trump / Theresa era of this particular farce ! as we are all strangled by overpriced property and a bad economic projection , as wages disintegrate and the value of the sterling remains utterly laughable  …. and yet the addiction to the syllabus is seemingly contagious....  !!

stop fucking complying with this shit …. if the council … any council are offering ' funding for the arts ' right now … then why cant we afford suitable social housing ?! why cant we afford suitable social provision ?? why the last time I had a doctors appointment to have a large shard of glass taken out of my foot was I brow beaten over the inevitable cost of such a procedure ….. so artists … all of those of you grappling with the notion as the perpetual identity crisis that it is , do a fucking art thing !!! personally I cant find the time to apply for the huge varying scale of all of these ' helpful resources' ( and from my experience from the field its always someones daughter or niece or cousin that gets ushered through these processes leaving fuck all for serious venture )

but if you do have the time to sit and sift through the extra government forms , or if you know someone that knows someone that can help you get that little bit of funding ( first of all take a good fucking look at yourself _) and then take that government money and go and build some tiny houses /get out there and engage with people in a way that they wouldn't ordinarily expect …. throw a ' happening ' … because if you are taking ' government ' money in this age of disgraceful austerity … and you are getting your posters done and buying some cheap chardonnay for the ' grand opening ' …. you are a fucking asshole , and if your calling yourself ' artists ' …. and Theresa may is calling herself a prime minister … then I am just going to sit here and play with dinosaurs and intentionally not comply with a single fucking facet of this public masturbate 'o' thon

as I have said before for me using art as a vocation was my means of general strike … and I have been considering myself in that state more or less since blair and bushes mad max middle east operations …. you see architecture and urban planning are absolutely worth protesting ( I can attest to that first and ) - education , both the quality and the price are absolutely contestable , the price of simple rental accommodation !! privatisation of public sector … the systematic deteriation of those sectors to enable the principle idea of private fucking enterprise taking over in the first place

and now the arts … yes even the arts , in its white washed asshole paradigm of arrogance that it currently exudes ! as mentioned in my previous post about the Cornish art scene .. the street artists really did a thing ! arrogant asshole galleries that were so high on their own money laundering pretense or private investments … weren't exhibiting any of the ' vandalism ' at the time … and so people without a venue option , displayed their work anyway …. some of them were just competently done pretty pictures ( some of which were very intricate ) a public c.v if you like  just wanting to get a commission for some mural in some bar , restaurant or hotel … but others were doing something extra ordinary … and this is where banksy and the now completely institutionalised ' street artists ' originated … as a protest movement … not just about the stilted and nepotistic gallery scene .. but about the greyness of the environment , the constant surveillance , the rise of the police state and the impending doom of us all …..

so now even the arts are worthy of protest , but lets be clear … only the corporate edged , government endorsed horse shit that is peddled ….  there is still actual art out there … its getting harder and harder to find , that cannot be denied …. but like a treasure hunt , the more erroneous journeys can often be the more rewarding …. so get out there and find your self the sunray Kelly's of the world, and tell everyone else to fuck off x

'ArtBy' Valerio & The Arts Hole - Outside' the Box '

you know its beyond ironic to me that the city of Plymouth is investing in its museum and art gallery at the moment ( you know how many people there are in this city that are living in actual poverty )

not only in this disgraceful age of austerity is Derriford hospital falling to pieces and filling what could otherwise be bed/ward space with fucking sainsbury's and domino's pizza ?? but the city is building a very expensive Box to cram all of the imperialistic ideals into as grand a façade as possible as quickly and cheaply as possible ( again no hint of intended irony there )

and once again I site myself in a position of prominence to tackle some of that style of pompous arseholery  ... taking on a small home studio for 5 months in this city that keeps trying to kill me !

Art By Valerio - absolutely outside the box !!!  0% Government 0%Corporate completely independent and uncensored 100% ABV  x x x


Art By Valerio & The Arts Hole Pop up Initiative

The Arts Hole POP UP Exhibition option sprang up in an otherwise disused space around the summer of 2006 at the height of the credit crunch in a sleepy coastal backwater in south East Cornwall , some have even accredited this resourceful act as one of the clear pioneering acts f the now internationally embraced and ever popular pop up initiatives that can be found city to city the world over !

originally designed as an act of protest against soaring property prices / stagnant wages and the Iraq invasion during a so called labour government at the time …

the Arts Hole went into Collaboration with the Tiffany Gallery East Looe Cornwall in the winter of 2008 which coined a friendship that lasts to this day

2011 the arts hole urban expansion was initiated, eventually coining the name ' The Valerio Institute of Alternative Learning '

2015 the arts hole franchise expansion to the Netherlands incorporating many student protest elements

2017 the arts hole on tour - sailing exhibition of arts and design principles

2018 the arts hole upstiairs - home spun charm while I have charmingly spun home x

''siting the ever popular ' Signature Style ' that is the artists own progressively developing style, within the Cornish ' Art Scene ' at the time, this artists prominence and notoriety has only broadened during his extensive career to encapsulate a portfolio of such diversity as to truly set him apart from his contemporaries - an internationally well respected and established, broadly underground creative ''

Arts Hole pop up galleries and studios (2006) are a community orientated creative industries company - an exhibition description for the trading entity known as ' Artby Valerio ' (1998) and can always be found via the traditional online means just google ' Artby Valerio and get in touch or keep up to date with the latest pop up schedules and exhibition dates

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The Cornish ' Art Scene '

the Cornish art scene is by and large reflective of so many elements of our current state of disarray  that it is amazing to me that is it is not more openly discussed !

Once upon a time - when most people still actually worked for a living, a bunch of faces deep etched by the daily Elememts they toiled in , on a rugged and windswept yet beautiful , far lung fringe of this land, opted to wile away times not spent toiling or drinking ….. on a few renderings ! Quite often composed out of left over tins of antifoul or homemade watercolours - this for me . is where the real guts of the ' Cornish Art Scene ' began !

and Cornwall remained for many years - a bit of a nostalgic throwback for decades after this actually - Humble / Rugged / Quant / Raw and Real x

That is of course until around the late 1960's and through the seventies , at this point legislation overtook production in this country full stop !

The ' Tourist Boom ' really began to take hold as the notion of recreationalism and ' obsessive compulsive acquisition ' really became a corner stone of a once proud ' ish ' economy .  ! but the little seaside getaways were now beginning to be replaced by cheap foreign holidays instead  !

but even so rents were reasonable and a sleepy yet ratifying existence could still be eeked out here, that is of course until the artificial inflation of the property market in the greater London area began to spill its poison out into the surrounding counties and like some untended infection ran rampant!

Fringe communities stared to spring up in greater and greater numbers ! Beatniks , Poets , Artsists and Hippies of all kinds would live in and travel around this last little avenue of freedom in these far flung places of cornwall, wales and scotland… away from the ministrations of our ever expanding yet increasingly inept administrations - looking for a more low cost / creative orientated way to live …. connected to the land and environment ! and in doing so really reinvigorated the Cornish art scene with a little innovation and recourceful ness...I recall moving to the area in the early 1980's and there really was still a rebellious / salty / piractical / farmer character to the place ...

this in turn encouraged the new waves of burgeoning Bourgeoise classes from Reagan and Thatchers delapidated and economically depleted  urban areas  ….. to come and ' Find out ' what was going on in Cornwall ( after all Bo Ho communities have always been where te party is … I know these days its all been rebranded into some weird amalgamative cross over between ' High Tea ' and ' Mad max but I do still think that between the bare lightbulbs - and upcycled palette bar installation - its still easy to see the genuine article over the bank balance orientated bullshit )

so these Hipsters ( Yuppies at the time ) unable to slow the degeneration of the boroughs they invested in - began to ' invest ' in the holiday home fairytale from Margaret thatchers nonsensical ' property ladder ' voodoo … which in turn of course , drove up prices and reduced the scale of attraction, and by default the flow of paradigm contesting art and artists that had been swarming to the region

Towards the end of the 1980's the ' Art Scene ' indeed much , was in Dire straits - most of the small independent Artists Studios had closed or relocated to the far more embracing and liberally minded Artists Communities in Europe and Further afield

Compounded by this was the infiltration of the Yuppy ilk from the London Class of Economics! came up with a con !

for about a decade you could find where once there was an actual working studio - a retailer of cheap Chinese and Taiwanese ' art ' ( mass produced in factories by unnamed unknown factory workers ...en mass ! ) in every Cornish town were these cheaper distributors of even cheaper wares posing as ' Cornish art ' by ' Cornish artists '

but it was a total scam and a lot of tourists got burned with this !

Fortunately this practice became so rife as to become blatant and people actually started noticing that instead of a Cornish fishing trawler in the painting … that if you looked closely it was actually a Chinese junk … in more ways than one !

so for a short while people did actually start questioning what they wee buying !

What was left of the original lobster pot hut , independent artists studios that had managed to survive the previous decades were constantly having to fight with their audiences - offering assurances of originality ( but like buying glass in venice … it can be pretty hard to be sure )

So Larger and Larger ' Collectives ' started to form …. these days try walking from one end of cornwall to the other and you cant travel five miles without tripping over some half baked collective or other ( we actually seem to be doing exactly the same with festivals at the moment too )

Roll on to Present Day

and all of these collectives are filled with ( at least it seems to me anyway ) a load of inept early retiring civil servamts and failed hairdressers from the home counties, that like nothing more than to sit around in edinburugh woollen mill garments that are at least two sizes too big for them …. and according to their ' artists statement ' they occaisionally take fido out for a couple of hours in some light drizzle so that they can chanel all of that ' raw energy ' and inspiration through some shitty ceramics process … or the smearing of a lot of tones of beige about !

if I could get it to convey appropriately …. I would fart loudly here ! but the point is lost a little in this written medium of choice

Of Course amongst all of these menopausal women posing as actual artisans simply because they had revenue to buy a house here ( all terribly dubious you understand ) you will find the now well established and royaly endorsed whistlefish - that for legal reasons cant call themselves an actal gallery anymore x and like jimmy Saville … the less said about that the better x ( a bit like a budget Tate - a load of corporate and government assholes that don't really know much about anything but how to manipulate fools … and in turn markets )
so now instead of Taiwanese paintings filling vacant overpriced premises , you will find on every Cornish highstreet one of these mcdonalds art distributors ….

and that's the situation as she stands !!its gone from bad to worse to dire … and I don't see any sign of improvement at all …. anywhere !!