Tokyo Art Beat
Hot off the press: TokyoArtBeat.com, a Web site that lists current art and design shows in Japan’s capital. This is an amazing, well-made project, available in both Japanese and English, that sports a crisp design and state-of-the-art coding — quite apart from being genuinely useful.
On a linguistic side-note: Olivier Thereaux and Paul Baron, the site’s founders and administrators, are both Tokyo residents and native speakers of French. Native French speakers have this thing about the H-sound at the beginning of words: ask a typical French speaker to pronounce the word “heartbeat” and you’ll get something like “artbeat”. But there’s more to the site’s name: the English word “beat” also refers to the area patrolled by a police officer — or, more specifically, to the patrol itself, the round or path that the police officer traverses on a daily basis. If you think of art as a space, the “beat” is a path through this space. Very clever.
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