LETTER FROM THE CHIEF EDITOR A
discussion about the roles of arts managers led to the I AM AN ARTS LOVER project. The team started by drawing a diagram on a blank whiteboard of arts managers’ roles; it included all the relationships that exist in the art world: artists, arts lovers, and ourselves—arts managers. The diagram revealed what arts managers should do within these relationships. Sophia, the project leader, expressed her feeling that the clutches of an invisible being, powered by massive passion, had grabbed and roughly pulled the team. When she recovered consciousness, she found herself already moving ahead with the project. The blank whiteboard held tremendous power. The starting point for the magazine was the idea of finding a tangible medium that would connect all the relationships represented in the diagram—something visible to connect artists to arts lovers. It could take the form of a booklet that’s always around and within reach when arts lovers stretch their arms to pick it up. It would feature artworks that are accessible from daily life, whenever and wherever. If there were such a thing, I believed, artists’ thoughts and words could be delivered to arts lovers more easily, and that would facilitate the ignition of communication between them. René Magritte said, “To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.” In order to start from a blank canvas, arts managers and designers who had recently graduated were the most appropriate and perfect combination. The process for creating this booklet was like untangling different skeins of yarn, arranging them by colors, and then sewing a fine seam in a designated order. It took longer than we expected, and the way we worked might have been inefficient since we started from a blank canvas. Each brought up separate threads in varied thicknesses and in a wide variety of different textures that didn’t match, and the needles to sew the threads were also different thicknesses and lengths. Nevertheless, we got something—something that is acquired during the process. We acknowledged each other’s different thoughts and levels of understanding; we experienced frustrations; and finally we met our expectations for the final product. It was all about how to communicate. It might have contributed to the team’s better understanding of artists and how to improve our communication with them and deliver content in a way that’s more accessible to arts lovers. Or it might have helped the team to discover how we present our own voices and our identities. Of course, this magazine that began with a blank canvas will not take the perfect form that each team member imagined in his or her mind at the outset. Yet if we get an opportunity to publish another one, we will again start with a blank canvas. It seems inefficient, but we enjoyed the process and the fruition that resulted from it. The product will be the accumulation of the experiences and skills of those who enjoyed the process. I also believe that the accumulation of our experiences and skills will ultimately be the origin for creativity.
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ARTS CONNECT PEOPLE