The Art of the First Move

Part I of II: The Limits of Persuasion

Setting the Board

You feel it before you understand it: Georgia is a place shaped by crossings, not borders.

East and West meet here, not cleanly, not comfortably, but through centuries of movement, trade, invasion, faith, and exchange. It sits on ancient routes where goods once travelled slowly and ideas slower still, passing from hand to hand through negotiation, friction, translation. Nothing arrived untouched. Nothing left unchanged.

For centuries, Georgia has asked visitors to slow down. To pay attention. To accept that understanding is not immediate. Its language, famously difficult and largely unrelated to those around it, stands as proof of that insistence. Georgians care deeply about words: argument, debate, poetry, prose. Meaning is not rushed here. You are expected to listen, to engage, and in time, to meet the place on its own terms.

It was in this context, in 2018, that I found myself in Tbilisi at the invitation of the British Council, attending the opening conference of Creative Spark. People had travelled from across Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia to gather in a place long accustomed to translation, and to ask a deceptively simple question: How do culture, creativity, and enterprise come to be understood, recognised, and valued?

The Comfortable Plan

As the conference unfolded, the same questions surfaced repeatedly.

How do arts, culture, and the creative industries find their way onto the agendas that matter: not rhetorically, but practically? How do they become visible to governments, to local authorities, to business leaders? How do they feature in education systems, in economic strategy, in export thinking? And beyond policy, how do they shape the way a country talks about itself, builds a narrative of place, signals what it values?

There was a shared sense in the room, rarely stated outright, that if the creative industries sat higher on these agendas, the environment in which they operated would improve almost by default. More attention. More legitimacy. More confidence.

At several points, the UK entered the conversation. From the outside, it appeared to occupy a relatively enlightened position. The British Council itself was one reason. Creative Spark, a programme investing time, money, and intellectual effort into building creative enterprise capacity internationally, was another. Then there were the exports: music, film, theatre, television.

British creative output had travelled, and travelled well. It had shaped not only markets but language, identity, familiarity. Even people who had never visited the UK often felt, in some way, that they knew it. They had heard it. Seen it. Absorbed it.

And yet, listening to these reflections from outside our own borders, I felt a quiet tension forming. Anyone who has worked in the UK’s creative industries knows this story is not as settled as it appears. That recognition has been hard won, partial, and often precarious.

So how had the perception taken hold?

In rooms like this, answers tend to arrive before the questions have fully settled. Policy. Strategy. Frameworks.

And to be clear, none of this was wrong.

Everyone present understood systems. They knew how change is meant to happen: white papers drafted; consultations run (sometimes more than once, for reassurance); strategies aligned across departments.

There was confidence that if the case could be made clearly enough, if the data were strong, the arguments coherent, the economic logic sound, then arts and culture would rise naturally in importance.

It was an attractive idea.

It suggested that progress was a matter of better thinking. A sharper argument. A more persuasive document. Perhaps, on a good day, a particularly well formatted PDF (circulated in advance, naturally).

And yet, as I listened, a small sense of unease formed. Not disagreement exactly. A sense that something essential was missing.

Even the best strategy, I found myself thinking, still needs permission before it can matter.

And then, unexpectedly, my mind wandered…

Not to another policy paper, or another framework. But to a photograph I had seen many years before in the newspapers. Britain in the late 1990s. A newly elected government. A line of artists and musicians standing outside a doorway.

At first glance, it seemed entirely unrelated.

And yet the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether the answer to the room's question might not be found in a strategy at all.

It might be found in a doorway.

What if the moments that change perception are not arguments - but gestures?