Why everyone needs to chill about The Glasgow Effect

For those of you who have been living under a rock, The Glasgow Effect is the project, experiment and “durational performance” of artist and activist Ellie Harrison which involves her not leaving the Greater Glasgow area for a whole year. But what has caused the most controversy is that Creative Scotland have given her £15,000 to do so.

There has been a massive uproar surrounding the project covered by The Guardian, The Mirror and Buzzfeed among others.

Thanks, in part to the name and it’s derogatory connotations with the low life expectancy in Glasgow compared to other EU cities, and also to the controversial use of chips as the cover photo of the event on Facebook, Ellie has received a huge amount of criticism.

The art project’s Facebook page

People say the project is nothing more than a “poverty safari” with the assumption that she is using the £15,000 to fund her living expenses, something a lot of people in Glasgow already do. There has even been a website created which with the click of a button generates better things you could do with the money and a Facebook Page has been created called The Alternative Glasgow Effect which details “what happens when you don’t spend a year being a delusional wanker”.

The problem with all of this is that most of this negative feedback is criticism for the huge amount of money Creative Scotland have given her and not many people seem to know what she is actually doing with the money or why and how she got the funding. Ellie is currently a lecturer at a Dundee university and the money she has received is in negotiations to go toward that uni finding a replacement for her this year, which provides a job opportunity for another artist and allows for her students to maintain a high standard of tuition.

Someone even made a website to say how the money could be better spent

What she is then going to do for the year is attempt to discover if it is possible to be a successful thriving artist in just one community, as a rebellion against the current demand for an artist or academic to have to travel to be successful. In order to receive her funding from Creative Scotland she had to meet a set of criteria, write a huge application  form which she entitled “Think Global, Act Local” and she raised over £10,000 of her own money to fund the project as well. Ellie is also using the year to focus on her own alternative, autonomous funding scheme called “Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund” which she believes avoids a lot the negative consequences associated with other government funding schemes.

The whole project is actually very well thought out and has several upsides including the reduction of her carbon footprint and the desire to create some good and thrive in her local environment. In a culture where everyone wants to be a gap yah wanker and we are told we need to be willing to travel to get jobs, she is basically seeing if that is true, and she plans to blog about it.

If you still think its not worth the money that’s fine, but everyone needs to stop thinking she is taking £15,000 to just chill in Glasgow, which I agree would be a waste of money and a whole lot of bullshit.