Alastair Upton, Chief Executive at the Bluecoat.Half our office didn’t get in to see the Turner Prize at the private view last week as the queues snaked out from the Tate, across the bridge and back to the Maritime Museum and it would have been over by the time they had got in. I’d been lucky enough to go the night before and there was a real buzz in the building. The Prize was in Liverpool and a marker was being put down for 2008. It felt substantial and a little glamorous.

The exhibition itself left me bemused. The Mark Wallinger piece looked like a video of a man in a bear suit being not particularly well filmed as he walked around an empty building. The accompanying text explained the work with its layers of meaning and references. Now, I understood the essay and I looked at the video but I couldn’t attach the two.

This worries me as Lewis Biggs from the Biennial was praising the work to me, likewise Antony our head of marketing and then I read reviews including Adrian Searle’s in the Guardian doing the same. It is one of those occasions when I feel it must be there but I haven’t seen it. Not all art is easy, nor should it be, so I’ll have to go back.

Having got a huge press contingent out of London for the Turner prize VAIL was launched at a press conference. Visual Arts in Liverpool is a consortium of the arts organisations in the City, including the Bluecoat, who have joined together to make the point that Liverpool already has the strongest gallery scene in the country outside London. Liverpool as the visual arts city needs to be better and more widely understood. As well as promoting this VAIL will package the gallery information together better to help visitors.

A video pinged into my email inbox at the end of the week from Granada TV. They have made a short piece on Veronica Watson. Veronica is learning disabled and a longstanding member of The Blue Room. This Bluecoat project works intensely with artists and people with learning difficulties In the video Veronica explains how the Blue Room has changed her life, supporting her through difficult periods and given her the confidence to be independent. This is one small but powerful example of how Liverpool’s arts organisations are so much more than just galleries for tourists.

On Friday there was the launch of the reprint of John Willett’s ‘Art in a City’. This book was commissioned by the Bluecoat in the 1960s and maps the state of art in Liverpool and sets out a possible future for the City and for art in its cultural, social and spiritual life. Bryan, our artistic director, introduced the book and has written a wonderful new introduction. He made the point that John’s book was so prescient that it almost points the way to Liverpool as the Cultural Capital of Europe and shows how the City would do it.

Alastair Upton, Chief Executive at the Bluecoat.