When the Tokyo site started, we were merely a group of enthusiastic art and design lovers wishing for a reliable source of information, unhindered by the arbitrary taste and whim of editors and “experts”. 
Neither was information hard to get – the address of a given museum is no state secret, and galleries will gladly send around their schedule to whomever is interested -, nor were we the first site to gather and broadcast information. If anything, we were just insane enough to believe we could hoard and re-broadcast everything, and translate it too. And on top of that, we wanted to make it really easy for us, TAB’s first batch of users, to browse, find or stumble on that information.
That was, and still is, the main added value of the ArtBeat sites: teach good information new tricks; help it entice new audiences, which the art world seldom talks to. A simple and comprehensive web site for the hardcore AND the curious crowds, with translations to open the Tokyo scene to the world. 
Then, <a href="/mytab/">mail alerts</a> for the forgetful, <a href="/resources/doc/badge">blog widgets</a> and <a href="/resources/doc/feeds">RSS feeds</a> for the bloggers and the tech savvy, even a <a href="http://m.tokyoartbeat.com">mobile site</a> for Tokyoites on the go. And for those with a taste for more than raw info, we started the bilingual <a href="/tablog">TABlog</a>…
<h3>What next? You decide!</h3>
We just opened the <a href="/resources/doc/api">Tokyo Art Beat API</a>, which, as any geek will know, stands for Application programming interface. What it means is actually the important part: it means that Tokyo Art Beat is now opening its event data, in a well documented format, for anyone with decent programming skills to use and build upon. In other words, this time we are setting our data free, free for people to share and broadcast to more places and in more ways than we could imagine. The API includes not only all the signature Art Beat event smart lists in a format suitable for hacking, mashups and new applications, but also a brand new geolocated search application: give it a location anywhere in the city, a couple of parameter and voilà! Sweet and shiny event data you can feed to your mashups and web apps.
So mash early and mash often: check out the <a href="/resources/doc/api">API documentation</a>, join the <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/artbeat-api/">discussion group</a> for tips, announces and feedback. Then start hacking… Show us what you can build with TAB’s data. Or, if you are a seasoned traveler or couch cosmopolitan, you may also like the fact that TAB’s sister site <a title="New York Art Beat API" href="http://nyartbeat.com/resources/doc/api">NYArtBeat has an API, too</a>.
Oh, and did we mention this magic mashup of yours could make you rich? TAB is one of the APIs of the <a href="http://mashupaward.jp/english/">4th Mashup Awards</a> contest running for another few weeks until the 16th of September.
Good luck, have fun, and make Tokyo a more beautiful and creative city in the process!
Update: a few apps and websites have already surfaced that make use of the TAB API… 
* <a href="http://fjbears.web.infoseek.co.jp/tab/en/">Tokyo Arts Events Information</a> 
* Search for nearby events from your keitai: <a href="http://www.softdevice.co.jp/~web/art/art.html">携帯Art Map</a> 
* <a href="http://labs.spicebox.jp/artres/">Tokyo Art Island</a> (click on the map) 
* <a href="http://wealthy.spskill.com/hotelinfo/main.html">駅’si VISION</a> 
* <a href="http://tal.l-w-i.net/">Tokyo Art Life</a> 
* a <a href="http://flyer-collection.com/">flyer collection</a> site 
* a simple and practical <a href="http://expre55.net/tab/iphone/">iPhone site</a>. And <a href="http://dalada.la/art/">another one</a>! 
* <a href="http://binbodate.com">Binbo Date</a> (“cheap dates”) which locates nearby art exhibitions (especially the free ones) and bars etc as cheap date spots. 
* a <a href="http://www.geocities.jp/ys_and_otherjp/">Windows Explorer plugin</a>

Tokyo Art Beat: now with an API!

Four years ago in Tokyo, a bunch of art-lovers from around the world created a website tailored to their quirks and needs: an easier way to enjoy the incredible wealth of art and design that the megalopolis had to offer, free of the corseted selections of experts and editors. What was pure fun, pure freedom – Tokyo Art Beat was born. 
Four years later, TAB has become the leading source for art and design information in Tokyo, and its younger sister <a href="http://www.kansaiartbeat.com">KAB</a> is putting the Kansai Scene under the spotlight (and celebrating a first year anniversary! <a href="http://www.kansaiartbeat.com/kablog/entries.en/2008/04/kansai_art_beat_celebrates_its.html">Happy birthday!</a>). With reviews, maps, bookmarking, smartlists, a mobile version and other features, TAB has made it easy for everyone from casual weekenders to hardcore art critics to discover new movements in the city and join the conversations around them. 
By 2008, TAB’s New Yorkers decided to extend the family back home with New York Art Beat, a new art and design guide to freedom.
Today, with already 700 events covering 850 venues, reviews on the blog, and much more to come, this big baby is making its first steps. 
Follow the beat.
Welcome to <a href="http://www.nyartbeat.com">New York Art Beat</a>.

Newborn for New York

There are close to 300 current and upcoming events on Tokyo Art Beat at the moment: some will inspire you, make you laugh, frown, think; some may leave you cold and disappointed, some may even change your perception forever.
Why don’t you share this with everyone? <a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/mytab/">Log in to your MyTaB account</a> (or <a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/mytab/register">register for a free account</a>) and become the Art Critic or Writer on Design you’ve been dreaming to be: smart, witty, informative…
Starting today, Tokyo Art Beat lets you write reviews of its events. Check the page for the event you visited, and 
<img src="/tablog/images/bethefirsttoreview.jpg" alt="be the first to review it" title="be the first to review it!" style="float:none" /> 
Get your prose seen by everyone, among the reviews from Tokyo Art Beat’s own <a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog">TABlog</a>. TAB reviews from the Japanese and English sides of the site are shown together, a meeting point where the two user communities of Tokyo Art Beat can enjoy each other’s input and insight.
Would you rather write that review on your own blog? Please do! TAB now even makes it easier, by giving you a beautiful fat slice of information, all nice and ready to be sent to your blog, at the bottom of each event page. Now you can focus on writing with style and insight, while TAB gives you the necessary info. 
<a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/event/2005/E495#blog_this"><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/images/blog_it.jpg" alt="info to paste in your blog" title="blog it! sample for Tsuguharu Foujita Exhibition" /></a>
One last thing: with so many national holidays, some of the venues will certainly be closed: don’t forget to double check their schedule on TAB, perhaps even give them a call, just in case. You wouldn’t want to find them closed and miss an opportunity to write that great review, now, would you?

TAB Reviews: Now YOU get to be the Art critic

<div>
	<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/200610-mothers.jpg" alt="Mother's - photos (c) Miyako Ishiuchi" title="Mother's - photos (c) Miyako Ishiuchi" />
</div>
The exhibition is a poem, an ode: starting with a tiny photograph of the simple woman next to a truck, in what appears to be postwar Japan, Ishiuchi builds a long poetic stanza. In lieu of words, large photographs of her late mother’s belongings: old lace, old silk, chemises and girdles, shoes, worn-out mittens. A wig, hair on a brush.
The whole exercise may be tedious, perhaps, without the punctuation — gorgeous prints of the old woman’s skin. Hand, foot, breast; these alone would make quite a powerful exhibition. But Ishiuchi wants to go further, infusing intimate objects with the personality, the soul of their owner. Yet, as much as I try, I cannot be convinced by the personification of these “portraits” of silk and lace.
<q>You have to be a woman to understand</q>, my friend tells me. How the feminine rituals and their symbols, the bra, the perfume and the lipstick, can fascinate and alienate the little girl who won’t get to know and experience all these firsthand for another decade.
I don’t quite get it — maybe I am just on the wrong end of the Oedipus Complex. But even the artist seems to have her doubts, commenting on her works as they were displayed in the beautiful stage of the Venice Biennale: <q>Freed from the reality of having been my mother’s personal effects, the items in the photographs became mere objects and I saw the simple, clear fact in the way that all waste had been whittled away, allowing them to stand on their own.</q>
Is Ishiuchi genuinely naive about her work, unaware that she might be the only one projecting the soul of her late mother into the things she once wore or owned, hoping that <q>the viewers will look upon this series arbitrarily with their own thoughts</q>? Or is she, perhaps, just too absorbed in the mourning process, obsessively searching the true person her mother was, beyond the parent — a woman?
Maybe what we are witnessing in Mother’s isn’t so much a portrait of Ishiuchi’s mother, but that of Miyako herself, through her obsession, through her mourning process. As Carl Jung wrote, <q>Unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analysing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life</q>.
Such a self-discovering process through works of art is rather common, and never bothers me when the work manages to stand on its own. Mother’s more than achieves that, with its poetry, with its invitation to look at our parents as woman and man, beyond the symbol.

News / Articles

Tokyo Art Beat: now with an API!

Newborn for New York

TAB Reviews: Now YOU get to be the Art critic

Beautiful Mourning – Miyako Ishiuchi “Mother’s”