Art Fair Tokyo obviously drew to a successful close. According to the organizers, even though the event took place on weekdays it attracted more than the estimated 30,000 visitors, and several represented galleries sold out all their exhibits on the first day. Executive director Shin Misa reviewed the Fair with a tired yet relieved expression on her face: "It was a rewarding event, I hope we can repeat the succcess next year." However, the fact that all but 5 of the participating galleries were Japanese, for example, is one of several negative points that hindered Art Fair Tokyo from attaining the level of major international events of this type. Whether or not it will be recognized as something like a "Tokyo edition of Maastricht’s 'Tefaf' (International Fine Art and Antiques Fair)" (as Shin likes to explain the event to foreignert), where antique art, Japanese and Western paintings, and contemporary art mix, is one of the issues that are to be resolved in the future.
On the second day, when the Fair was open to the general public, the "Art Web Meeting 01" talk event took place at one the Forum’s conference rooms. It was the first ever occasion for representatives of three websites specializing in art (and culture) in the Tokyo area or Japan as a whole to get together for a discussion. Panelists were artscape webmaster Haruki Yumiko, Tokyo Art Beat (TAB) co-founder Paul Baron, Fujitaka Kosuke, Olivier Thereaux, and my own 5-piece team representing REALTOKYO. The talk session was so well attended that the venue’s 70 chairs weren't enough and many had to listen while standing. Carried along by Osaka resident comedian and notiorious art collector Oka Kenta’s alert navigation, the conversation could have continued much longer than the scheduled 90 minutes. It was fun, but considering that, besides the navigator, there were five participants (and Paul and Olivier needed translators), there were so many things we didn't get around to talking about.
After the session we all agreed that part two has to follow soon.
Following simple presentations of each website — basically brief introductions of contents, structures and special features — and a 2-minute video interview with former Mori Art Museum director David Elliott (presently the director of Istanbul Modern) inserted as an interlude, the second half of the event was reserved for an exchange of opinions on the World Wide Web’s developments since each site’s establishment, the importance (or better, necessity) of Japanese-English bilingual information, future prospects and other topics, followed by a short debate.
"artscape" is with 12 years in total the oldest participant, and the most experienced in the production of archives of data related to museums and exhibitions. RT was launched seven years ago, and publishes previews of art and other culture-related events from the viewpoints of multiple authors, as well as regular columns. Started about two years ago, "TAB" is the youngest in the trio. It provides rich and fully bilingual (with the exception of the reader’s column) art and design information. While basically similar, each of the three participants has its own distinct features, and accidentally — or, actually rather consciously — the segregation is in fact a useful division of roles.
A point each representative mentioned not without self-pride is that of "edited" contents. Different from the thousands of personal blogs, all contributions are subject to inspection by an editorial team, to ensure a certain level of quality in contents and writing style. For example, we set a character/word limit to avoid writers' doodling. We also do back research to some extent to make sure all is correct and true. We try to elimitate spelling mistakes and errors. Each of the three websites has a proper system for "editing and correcting" that individual writers naturally don't have (unrelated to their writing skills). There may exist opinions like "it’s fine as long as it’s interesting", but we consider it as a troublesome yet essential part of our jobs to increase the credibility of what we are publishing.
Regarding suggestions for future steps, "a shared database of exhibition and other information" is one thing that was requested by all. Event information has to be input manually, be it by organizers or management staff. RT is dealing also with information concerning movies and other events of particular formats, so in our case the situation is a bit different, but to share would still be the best solution. in order to make this possible, a unified format for information registration is urgently needed, and at the same time event organizers have to be educated about the developments and urged to input their own event information. The best would be to build one big database site that not only this time’s three involved parties, but everybody else could use, and to which hosts and organizers (in this case museums, galleries or alternative spaces) would upload information that each medium can then pick up. That would be something comparable to image.net that supplies members of the press and other media with "PR information and advertising material from such varied fields as entertainment, fashion and sports", a service that already exists in the film industry. I suppose event organizers could be motivated to upload information if they could make use of a system that creates at the same time press releases in PDF format.
The ultimate goal, however, lies further ahead. It was back when we launched RT that chief programmer Shimada Takuya and art director Kosaka Jun warmly discussed future possibilities, and proposed a robot that browses the web and picks up cultural information as needed. It’s a bit like the present image of RSS, and since seven years have passed since, I think it’s about time to make that dream a reality. There are of course a number of hurdles to take in order to get there, such as the unification of standards for example, and, first and foremost, the problem of time and money to channel into the development. But I'm sure that'll be a mechanism creators, users and media alike would benefit from, I really want to jump over those hurdles and realize the project. Therefore, I'd like to appeal to everybody concerned to support us on our big mission.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO