Last year, the Akita Municipal Junior College of Arts and Crafts embraced a new objective: “to nurture and develop professional arts practitioners with an Intelligence for Beauty.” This objective is based on our belief that today’s arts students need to cultivate not only the ability to appreciate and understand what makes an object beautiful, but also the intelligence to apply that understanding in a way that resonates with contemporary lifestyles and cutting-edge technologies.
This is the most basic contribution that art colleges can make to the wider society. In order to truly serve society, arts training institutions should not merely follow social trends but rather actively seek out and identify social values and their corresponding needs. Another way of expressing the idea of, “arts practitioners with an Intelligence for Beauty” might be “arts practitioners who can define the aesthetic requirements of contemporary society.”
Specifically, what is required of today’s art colleges is that they nurture and develop artists who have the ability to break down the boundaries between art and making (“creative destruction.”) By this we mean artists who revive craft-based skills to create contemporary artworks, designers who apply the senses developed through manual work into cutting-edge technologies, city planners who utilize the history of places in urban renewal and so on. It is the mission of arts institutions to provide the environment to nurture such artists.
When defining the aesthetic requirements of contemporary society, it is important to first clarify what culture is being relied on to frame and inform that definition. The answer for us is indicated by our nickname Akita Bitan. We believe that cultures that are deeply rooted in and trusted by the local community contain the most wisdom.
Lifestyles that have evolved in unique ways due to the particular localities or areas in which people live are losing their individual characteristics as globalization becomes a stronger force in all our lives and European and U.S. cultures gain prominence. At the same time, local cultures are being mined for their potential to draw tourists in the name of nationalism. In these circumstances, a deliberate and aware practice of “localism” is one way to bring back local flavor and characteristics. We regard localism to be the foundation of Akita Bitan and the transmission of the Akita culture to the rest of the world to be an important expression of this.
Without preconceptions or stereotypes and the courage to believe in new ideas, we are determined to fulfill that task.