To each artist his own world...
The process of globalization that colors the beginning of the third millennium, in business but also at myriad levels of our very lives, is not happening without trials. It is a mighty process of many layers, and while there is a broad consensus about the tremendous achievements of progress, notably in telecommunications, that it brings, it is also intensely controversial. Each person in the global village has an opinion and position, and criticism too. With the Gateway to the World exhibition, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange took on a particularly complex mission - to give the voices of Israel's artists their say. Dozens of Israel's leading artists were invited to participate in the project and create their own personal versions of the planet Earth and the contemporary processes taking place on its surface.

Each artist was invited to employ his unique skills in presenting his vision of the world and his opinions as an inhabitant of the planet Earth, and as an artist. The exhibition as a whole, the theme elaborated by the various artists, presents a colorful tapestry of thoughts and positions that beautifully reflect the lively cosmopolitanism of Tel Aviv.

The argument as to whether the Earth was round or flat raged for eons. A map of the world dating from a thousand years BC, scratched onto a clay tablet in ancient Babylon, showed it as a flat disk. The first depiction of Creation appears in the Egyptian city of Memphis, dating back to 710 BC. The father of cosmology, Anaximander of Ionia, was an artist who tradition says was the first to draw an actual map of the world, concluded that its surface was not flat, but round. In the year 350 BC Heraclides, a Greek philosopher and astronomer, wrote that the daily movement of the sun, the moon and the stars could only be possible if the Earth was rotating on an axis. But it was only 1,800 years later that these concepts received scientific ratification.

The meeting of the artist and the globe in the Gateway to the World exhibition is a triangle whose third point is the TASE, which has thus forged a connection with special power. Each company was free to choose an artist, based on his past works and other information about him. The company and artist than conducted a dialogue whose results are reflected in the design of the globe, which at the end of the exhibition on Rothschild Boulevard will be moved to the companies' offices to be shown on a permanent basis.

Each artist faced a double challenge: to reflect his personal view of globalization, and to faithfully represent the company - its symbols, its values and its activities.

Collaboration between business and art is commonplace throughout today's western world. From the 1980s onward, it has become customary for companies to invest in relationships with artists and to buy works for their collections, as part of their commitment to their communities. Leading banks around the world buy important artworks and help museums and galleries mount art exhibitions and projects that couldn't otherwise take place. Giant corporations such as IBM, Coca Cola, and Philip Morris, the very epitome of globalization, massively donate to projects of creation and art.

Israel has been part of the process since its very beginning. Back in the 1980s various public organizations and private companies began to bring the worlds of industry and art closer. Among these efforts are the organization Business for Art (Alma) and Mifalot Discount for the Arts; and huge companies such as the Israel Electric Corporation, the Mekorot water utility, Oil Refineries, the Nesher cement works, the Mifal Hapayis lottery turned works of art into integral parts of their promotional and public relations campaigns.

The affiliation of art with business benefits both. The artists face fresh creational challenges and are enabled in practice to express themselves; to present their works, to mount exhibitions and to win publicity and respect. The companies gain a rich cultural aspect that improves their image and adds color to their business activities.

Gateway to the World presented the participating artists with a challenging task that plucked them from the depths of their studios and aroused new creative forces in them. The cascade of creative designs, which brim with inspiration and sometimes a breath of fantasy too, bear testimony to the enthusiasm - and emotionalism - with which the artists embarked upon the project.

The Earth, our planet, apparently the only one in the universe that has human life, has always fired artistic imagination. Peter Ginz, a 14-year old Jewish artist who the Nazis murdered in Prague in 1942 during World War II, drew what he thought the Earth might look like from the moon. His picture, which has been commemorated on a stamp, more than anything symbolized the yearning of the young boy held captive inside the walls of the ghetto, to break free. The Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon took his picture to outer space and showed it to the entire world. Ramon's flight beyond the constraints of the globe has been a source of inspiration and national pride to many.

The Gateway to the World exhibition is a cultural-artistic document that presents a rich, variegated interpretation of the planet on which we live, as a single human tapestry. The TASE, which initiated this exhibition, is adding another facet to the reciprocal relations between business and art, which is fundamental to the cultural climate of the State of Israel. With Gateway to the World, the TASE has created a model for emulation by the rest of corporate Israel.

Esti Drori and Doron Pollack
Exhibition Curators