Be part of an open brainstorming session on how to “work” art projects!
After gaining popularity through artist-led gatherings in the 1990s, art projects became more and more common in the 2000s and gradually developed into local art festival-sized events. Now, art projects are forming all across the country and involving an increasingly diverse range of people—but are also feeling the effects of minimal institutionalization, a lack that leads to sizable gaps in organizer expertise and problems with employment-related matters. This fiscal year, the “‘Creating Happy Places’ Brainstorming Group” (a part of the Tokyo Art Research Lab [TARL] Research and Development Program) held numerous discussions to help verbalize the process of getting cultural project and art project personnel to play vital roles in enhancing social capital. This Interim Report Session takes inventory of the main points and issues the Brainstorming Group has talked about over the course of the year. We welcome the participation of anyone who wants to look at what goes into working on a cultural project or art project.

The “Creating Happy Places” Brainstorming Group
The “Creating Happy Places” Brainstorming Group works to bolster the infrastructure for creating culture in the art project context, help organizers and workers enhance their expertise, and establish a discourse on and methodology for improving awareness of the field. Bringing together a wide variety of members—from art coordinators and planners to community designers and accountants—with experience in Japan and overseas, the Group discusses and verbalizes the current issues facing the field and the possibilities that the future could hold for art projects. By using the output from brainstorming sessions to create and share viable, practical tools, the Group ultimately aims to team up with the growing, diversifying community of art project personnel in helping the concept of “culture as public policy” take root.