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When he is not producing or directing dance and music performances, Damian Woetzel, director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program, heads a number of initiatives to broaden the appeal of many different art forms. He works with Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Project in the New York City Public Schools, and is also behind an eye-catching project to bring more culture into inner-city education, healthcare and other public services called the .

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Bring a 600-strong opera chorus to a department store, or a group of ballroom dancers to an airport? It’s all in a day’s work for Dennis Scholl, the man credited withÌýcreating ‘happy surprises’ in the shape of . Hoping to ‘dim the bright lights’ that sometimes create a barrier between artists and the public, Dennis is on a mission to make professionally-produced culture available to all.

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A partner at a leading design firm Ideo, Fred Dust says that good design should be about so much more than simply creating beautiful objects: it should make even unwieldy bureaucracies work better for us, ordinary citizens. Fred has been applying his design thinking to major brands, charities and non governmental organizations, the US government, and recently to a of CEOs from Silicon Valley’s most innovative companies.

Life is chaotic, hence art strives to create an order out of chaos. It strives to unite what seems to be scattered. The world of the art creates another reality, another Eden which is a sole creation of human beings. We experience living our lives in a parallel universe which is more durable, complete, and satisfactory.

Literature, for example, provides us escape to a world which is beyond the control of human atrocities. We multiply ourselves, our individuality, a kind of incarnation we experience. We are at the same time an objective reader and a character which affects and is affected by the chain of events in the story. You become what you always wanted to become. We transform and re-transform ourselves.

Elia Khan

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