Arts events covered for many media

Craig Richardson seems completely at home at McCabe's Tavern, one of downtown's more casual bars.

But Richardson seems at home nearly anywhere in town. As one half of Colorado Culture Cast, he's given video coverage to some 170 arts events since February 2007 - and like McCabe's, a 21st century bar that seems older than it really is, it's already hard to imagine the arts scene without Culture Cast.

Richardson and Klayton Eliot Kendall created Colorado Culture Cast - Springs Culture Cast until it recently increased its geographical presence - as a response to a lack of arts coverage on television.

"And when they do cover the arts, it's totally awkward," Richardson said. "You can't do meaningful arts criticism in 18-second sound bites."

VENUE: "Anyone else's venue," Richardson said. They create video on site and edit it at their downtown office, covering an average of two events a week.

BACKGROUND: Richardson studied television production at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs but hadn't done much with it until he met Kendall early in 2007.
"Klayton had no formal training but had done quite a bit of video," Richardson said.
"We started talking, and soon it was, ‘Why don't we do this show? People will see that it's not scary to go to an art opening. Everyone seems to be having fun.'"

TAKE ON THE SCENE: When we started, the arts were riding a wave," Richardson said. "COPPeR was starting to take off. There were a lot of discussions last summer about the tipping point.
"Then, maybe it was just winter malaise, but that feeling started receding in February. Right now there's some defeatism."
Richardson thinks that's not because things aren't going forward: "The reality is, it's much better than it was two years ago," he said. But they're not going forward as quickly as people would like. And he said that the departure of Michael De Marsche from the Fine Arts Center was a blow to the public perception of the arts scene, if not to the actual scene.
"There were people invested in the personality and not in the thing itself," he said.

CHALLENGES:"The challenge is always trying to find new ways of telling the story," he said.
"‘What's special about this First Friday?' You have to be open and objective enough to show the truth. You can fall back on a formula, but those segments always suck, and people can tell."

REWARDS: "When somebody stops you on the street and says they saw the show on the Library Channel, or heard it on KRCC, and went and saw something they otherwise wouldn't have," Richardson said. "When an arts organization tells us there was a spike in their attendance after a Culture Cast segment. Then it's all worth it."

DEFINE SUCCESS: Richardson and Kendall are redefining success as they go forward. Colorado Culture Cast will soon be featured on a Denver PBS affiliate station, and they're expanding their coverage from local to statewide.
"We think of the site becoming more of a destination than a repository," Richardson said.
"There are a lot more channels for people to experience the arts, more ways to bring awareness of all the channels for the arts in the state."