Arte e Educação - Fundação Bienal do Mercosul

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status of artists in popular culture (John
Malkovich as Gustav Klimt, Ed Harris as Jackson
Pollock, Anthony Hopkins as Pablo Picasso, Salma
Hayek as Frida Kahlo, Nicole Kidman as Diane
Arbus, Milos Foreman’s recent film about Goya
with a Natalie Portman as well as prizes like the
Turner and the Boss which expose artists as
celebrities etc. to a wide public).
This cultural milieu, combined with the absence
of any true reform of art education since the
Bauhaus movement in the early 20 th century,
makes the attention the 6 th Mercosul Biennial
provides to the discussion and contemplation of
the role of art education, and its relationship to
our reception of art, not only welcome, but
essential and perhaps urgent.
I tend to concentrate my remarks on graduate art
schools which I used to consider an area very
distinct from undergraduate programs, although
this is changing rapidly as well. I realize my
comments are local and not meant to represent a
dominant position but I think they are in some
ways typical of at least North America. This focus
is for two main reasons: first, as dean of the School
of the Arts at Columbia University for six years I
ran a graduate school and know more about it;
second, I worked with the Anaphiel Foundation
in Miami for two years trying to figure out what
a graduate art school might look like in the 21 st
century. And lastly, since I am currently working
with Arizona State University in Phoenix to
establish an institute for media, culture and
research, scheduled to open soon, called F.A.R.
(future arts research).
The first portion of my discussion will concentrate
on what I see as the most significant changes in
the teaching of art over the last decade. These
include the introduction of new technologies, the
disjunction between art history and art making
and the related issue of interdisciplinarity, and
the creation of a need-based or user-based
curricula. Where instituted and nurtured, these
alterations go some way to enabling schools to
prepare students for participation in the
professionalized art world of the early 21 st
century. 1 I follow these remarks with a discussion
of my observations in European schools and the
cumulative effects of these changes on our
reception of art. But more on that later, and now
to the most needed changes for art education as I
see them.
I am aware that technophiles are often guilty of
overemphasizing the ubiquitous presence and
importance of the technologies of communication.
However, it remains fair to say we are a generation
swimming in information and entertainment.
From iphones to facebook, youtube, google,
podcasting and internet pornography, the
weapons of mass distraction are our world. Two
million spam emails are dispatched every second,
a hundred and seventy-one billion irrelevant
messages a day. If there were a glimmer of real
sustainable hope in this chaos and confusion I
would argue that it is in the fact that the world is
becoming, ironically, less text-based – less based
on words. I would like to think that we have
entered a post-literate society – a very third term
society, which I believe we should embrace. In a
very real sense, our sense of knowledge is shifting