Contextsof the late- capitalist ideology of a free market system. ultimately, it seems that the
notion of art could be erased in the title of art academies whereupon they subsequently
could continue as ‘academies for creative industries’ dominated by the paradigm of a
world characterized by economic and financial dogmas without any commitment to
other worlds.
in the context sketched above, there is yet another alarming trend. Remarkably
enough, the established practice of curating exhibitions started to expand the notions
of academy and education during the last couple of years. increasingly, exhibitions
are emerging characterized by a curatorial paradigm based on notions such as ‘the
expanded academy’ or an ‘educational turn in curating’. obvious examples are the
curatorial concepts of Manifesta 6: notes for an art school and Dokumenta 12: what is
to be done? These connotative expansions contributed to a further disintegration of
the position of the art academy as such. if the entire domain of the art world can
be determined by academic parameters, it clearly seems to be the case that the art
academy as such has inevitably lost its unique position. With that, the academy seems
to have demonstrated the unmistakable crisis of its institutional redundancy.
The Bologna rules and its challenges mentioned above, i.e. the introduction of a
Bachelor- master (Ba- ma) system in art education ultimately seem to have delayed
the above mentioned crisis in a positive way. Fortunately, the curriculum to be
introduced in the european art educational system as per 2010 will also necessitate a
re- evaluation of the specificity of art education (de greef 2008). such a reflection will
position the debate on the specificity of the academy in the context where it should be
conducted, i.e. within the institutional framework of art education. This will not lead
to a homogenizing framing, as some conservative criticasters fear; it will rather result
in a form of differential thought enabling the rethinking of the somewhat obsolete
concept of autonomy while turning it into an autonomy of commitment. Because of
that reformulation of the curriculum and its related production of room for thought,
the art academy could become the pre- eminent location in the cultural domain to
generate innovative processes during the upcoming decade.^1
art education should again be aware of its responsibility in the fields dominating our
various cultural and intellectual domains. Clearly, those domains have been dominated
by an economic- financial paradigm in an almost catastrophic way. Therefore, today’s
art academy should entirely focus on re- evaluating its original task of creating novel
forms of perception and critical awareness from the perspective of committed forms of
autonomy while combating prevailing economic models of thought.
artistic researchuntil recently, the curricula of many art education institutes turned out to be dominated
largely by an art historical model of reflection. Consequently, one gratuitously employed
a clear- cut duality where on the one hand, artists produced artistic work, while on
the other hand external professionals (mostly art historians) supplied frameworks
for interpreting those works. in the last decades, standard works such as Art and
Illusion (gombrich 1977) and Truth and Method (gadamer 1975) have provided a
methodological foundation for such a nearly dogmatic art historical hermeneutics (cf.
slager 1995: 133–41).