Appreciation by the public as art audiences is the end of the whole chains of an art event, delivering a great question of what is expected from this matter in the end. A question of its existence between as an empowering force to support the art development itself, common opinions in everyday basis, or an element which is continuously exploited as sources of artists’ creative ideas. The whole issue raises an actual distance, from the weakness of art infrastructure, the lack of attention in reaching the target audiences in art spaces, also the incompetence of the government and academy to functionalize their institutions.

In this edition, Karbon attempts to detect the shattered pieces of this matter. Such various and different perspectives gathered here are still not able to present the answers in a monolithic view, but it should be considered as discontinuous references according to each of its own background, orientation and situation.

Those pieces cover the views of art event organizers, art space managers and gallery owners, as a broad scale of viewing elements along with the specification and the problems in dealing with audiences. Also there are several notes of interactions in public spaces as events and the views of artists on public orientation in their works. Other references are direct perspectives of audiences in viewing art; an unnoted reality which is needed to be presented in re-examining to what extend art exists in its society.




Farah Wardani & Ardi Yunanto
editor




Farah Wardani is a writer, lecturer, and art curator. She was an editor at the Karbon journal until 2006. She was an editor at the Visual Arts magazine, Jakarta until 2007. She is now the Executive Director of the Indonesian Visual Art Archive in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Ardi Yunanto was born in Jakarta, November 21, 1980. After graduating from the Department of Architecture at the National Institute of Technology in Malang, in 2003 he returned to Jakarta, the city where he grew up. In 2004, he joined ruangrupa and has been working as the editor in chief for www.karbonjournal.org since 2007. Besides writing tremendously unproductively about the city and art, he also works as a book editor, researcher for several cultural projects, and a graphic designer, while still trying hard to write fictions.