Editorial

I don't quite get it, I think daily as I open my eyes and look around: it literally is a wonder-full world. Wonderful life produces amazing art - in both of them it's all about living and experiencing, not achieving and understanding. "I don't quite get it" is also a comment often heard around contemporary art. "The most important aspect of art is the personal experience", responds Berndt Arell, the Museum Director of Kiasma, in this magazine.

Kiasma celebrates the opening of its next decade by focusing on the basic themes of art and art museum. The museum's mission is to make experiencing art possible and effortless, thus making it possible for the viewer to create and open up to his or her own experience.

Even though all the ways to see, perceive and experience are equally correct, may hints of different approaches assist in getting more out of the experience. In the beginning of the year Kiasma introduces various viewpoints to image and - as we're dealing with contemporary art - the lack of it. The collections exhibition Image and After, the intimate photographs of Nan Goldin and the gargantuan paintings of Julian Schnabel all titillate the viewer to really see what is being looked at.

According to a professional art viewer a good art work gets you to react in several levels: it makes you ponder things and causes pure pleasure. Welcome to celebrating Kiasma to react, think, see, wonder, ponder, realize, feel, understand, enjoy - experience!

-Milla Unkila