TAB Co-founders (left to right): Kosuke Fujitaka, Olivier Thereaux, Paul Baron

Timely, comprehensive, easy-to-use, free and
popular, Tokyo Art Beat—better known as TAB—offers the city’s best bilingual art- and design-event listing website, possibly unmatched worldwide. Click on www.tokyoartbeat.com and you’ll easily find not only the where, when and how of Tokyo’s full range of art happenings, from the big museums to small boutique galleries, but also quick insightful feedback from the site’s 10,000-15,000 daily users.

As a frustrated art goer, co-founder Paul Baron along with Olivier Thereaux and Kosuke Fujitaka launched the website in October 2004 to simply fill the art information gap. But after offers to help their all-volunteer effort started pouring in, they knew they were onto something special. The original core team of three quickly became 30. Last year, with their design and format in place, TAB opened a small office with three paid staff still supported by some 10 volunteers juggling full-time day jobs in the design and internet fields. In just over two years, the staff has covered nearly 10,000 shows at approximately 600 venues. And although offering both Japanese and English versions doubles their workload and triples their cost, they feel it’s important to maintain that 20 percent English readership. “Twenty percent may not sound like a lot, but for a Japanese-based website, it’s astonishing,” explains Fujitaka. “Those users are foreigners here in Japan and also from abroad. Until TAB, there was limited information in English on the internet about the Japanese art scene, and not a lot of attention from abroad. We heard from one gallery that because of TAB, they’d been contacted by someone from Africa. As a Japanese person interested in the arts, I felt there was a real need for this kind of website.”

TAB is more than just a vertical list of art shows. The site offers seemingly simple, yet untapped new angles of information. Let’s say you’re interested in photography and you want to find out about the Hiroshi Sugimoto show at Koyanagi Gallery. Click around TAB and in addition to the information on that exhibition, you’re offered details about events nearby, reviews of the show in Japanese and English publications, and personal recommendations from users. By becoming a “MyTAB” member you can post your own input.

This interactive element is one of the site’s most successful features. “We started with the concept that we didn’t want to have editorial selection,” explains Thereaux. “We eventually added some of our own editorial content, but we didn’t want to be the ones to say, ‘This is cool, go there.’” We wanted to let people choose what was cool and make recommendations to other users.”

TAB also offers information on free events, shows that would interest children, and exhibitions that are open late.

In addition to the art listings, Gadago (coined from “gotta go”), the non-profit organization behind TAB, offers two other services. One, called DIVVY/dual, uses “open-source” principles to offer events and discussions that challenge the traditional artist-curator-audience relationship. The new “Jobs” page features listings for employers seeking art and design professionals—the only bilingual internet job site of its kind.

TAB is now looking beyond Tokyo. In partnership with the Flanders Center,
a Belgian cultural foundation based in Kansai, TAB will launch a Kansai-focused site this spring. New York is also on the radar. “Although New York is the capital of the art world, the information, at least on the internet, is not that rich,” explains Fujitaka, who hopes to move there this summer to kick-start the site.

The future appears bright for the three entrepreneurs, still in their late 20’s. They have been approached several times by buyers. But remarkably, with TAB registered as an NPO, they have little interest in becoming dotcom millionaires. “We are not for sale,” says Baron. “We established TAB in the spirit of sharing information about art. We are not in it to make money.” Thereaux adds, “Probably we are one of the few nonprofit startup websites in the world. Everything these days seems to be about cashing in, especially about art. We are trying to distance ourselves from that idea.” “We will be ‘foreverdotcom’ winners because we have nothing to lose,” Baron says, and then adds with a laugh accented in his native French, “There is more to art than Monet.”

See www.tokyoartbeat.com for more info.

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