A Recipe for the future?  – Singapore-based  Amanda Heng got blindfolded Stellar Maris High School students to cook up a feast at Rumah Air Panas’s Contemporary Art in School (CAIS) Project 2008.

Although  we’re young and didn’t need a facelift (we are beautiful just the way we are) sometimes you just have to do what makes you feel good, you know I mean? And now we’re back and we’re bad (Michael Jackson’s style) after just over a month of redesigning! What do you think? Cantik or not?

But our rehaul is not just cosmetic. It also came about due to a genuine desire to improve the site, to improve the way we work and continue to support visual arts and culture through a diversity of fun and critically informative posts. So we thought we would take this opportunity to reflect on the goals of ARTERI once more.

As Editors we are have done a lot of soul searching on what we can achieve and what the best way to move forward would be. After numerous meetings at MERAH with much laughter and frustration we have decided to become more structured in our approach to ARTERI as a whole and try and streamline our practices. This sounds all very businessy right? What to do la, like that la. If we want to continue, we have to have a clear strategy for sustainability in terms of finance and working practices. This starts now in the form of advertising space on the site, fundraising approaches through grants and donations, clearer posting instructions for us and our contributors and specific roles for each of the Editors to manage as individuals which will hopefully cut down on endless meetings.

Sharon will be focusing on the running of the site as a whole and our business side, Simon will be looking at fundraising and development and Eva will be keeping an eye on our content which we are going to plan in advance a bit more to help keep things balanced and in the mix. All three of us will still continue to post, and are up for anything that happens along the way, but by being more articulated we can keep going more efficiently. So hopefully less meetings and more action! And you know, the only outcome from meetings are more meetings. Our attitude has always been to just do it (Nike if you want to advertise please contact us!) so we are going to go back to that.

Vitriolic, vigorous, vociferous, vicious, vivacious comments made on ARTERI blog visualised in The Best Art Show in the Univers exhibition 2009.

Also ARTERI will be focusing all of our attention on the site, so no more curatorial projects or talks under the ARTERI banner, it just takes away time from our main priority which is the site. Sorry guys. If anyone wants to contact us as individuals please do so we are happy to hear from you! But we want to focus all of our efforts to making our little online blog the best it can be, which means that volunteers and interns are always welcome :)

However, this post was all about our dreamy dreams for ARTERI and where we want to go. Well someone once told me that if you define a vision then you are limited by it because you have to every so often explain why you have not achieved this or why you are changing it. Makes sense right? But everyone has gotta have a dream. So perhaps we can come up with a few lofty things that won’t come back to bite us in the ass later.

As always ARTERI wants to support visual arts and culture in Malaysia and Southeast Asia through a diverse range of writing and image essays on exhibitions, projects and events. This will be in the form of reviews, opinion and editorial pieces from contributors in Malaysia and the Southeast Asian region. We want to have a good stream of regular content from the three of us as well as our geng of writers and contributors. We want to keep the site fun and critically rigorous to be both silly and serious at the same time. Anything goes and we want your comments on everything.

We want to see a world where art is not just a commodity that is financially validated by writing, but something that is relevant and meaningful to wider audiences that is assisted by writing. Art should be an area that people want to read about, that is challenging, entertaining and exciting. It should inspire new ideas and thoughts on life.

ARTERI wants to contribute to this utopia. Ok? Dreamy enough? Thanks for sticking with us and watch this space.

(EM)