Alastair Upton, Chief Executive at the Bluecoat.Yoko Ono is in town this week and playing the Bluecoat tomorrow.

The Yoko experience has panned out much as we thought it would with the media being very interested in her and this has brought a lot of attention to us but it has been hard to get them beyond her to the other artists.

Tickets for her gig sold out in minutes and Yoko agreed a couple of days ago to a live feed for the event going into the Bluecoat hub and the big screen in the city centre. There is now a lot of work to do on this very quickly and we will see if we can get a webcast too while setting up the feed.

What has surprised me is the response to Yoko’s work. Not from the journos which has been largely luke warm (including I think someone who reviewed the piece unseen - tut, tut if I'm right, sorry if I'm wrong) but from the public. I got a fascinating letter this week from what I presume from the handwriting are two older ladies. While commending the Bluecoat changes they pointed out a few things we could change including having more camillias in the garden which I will follow up.

Their main point though was a complaint about the content of the Yoko videos which are of a nude woman's body, however the letter finished with a request for the return of the Bluecoat’s life drawing classes (which would of course include naked people being drawn).  

Nudity has been the object of art for ever but still we seem to react to it in the strangest of ways. The Yoko piece to me is more benign than brazen and much less erotic than the Cranach paintings, posters of which were recently banned and then unbanned by the London underground. The lady letter writers were not alone in their concern and our comments book has had lots of comments including an entry saying 'what will people think of Liverpool for showing this work'.

I worry what people would think if Liverpool didn't show this type of work, don’t you?