Course 2025-2026 a.y.

Topics may include:

1) Art & Education: course introduction 

2) Reference book: Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant School Master 

3)  From the Académie to studio practice: learning through doing 

4) The Studio: Gustave Courbet, The Artist's studio, 1855 

5) The Studio and the gallery: Brian O’Doherty, Inside the white cube, 1976 

6) Radical Museology. What’s contemporary in Museum of Contemporary art?

7) The artist as curator. The curatorial work of Marcel Duchamp

8) The school as an experiment of collaboration: Black Mountain College, 1933 - 1957 

9) Artistic practices social turn and subjectivity

9) Education on show: L’Art d’apprendre. Une école des créateurs, Pompidou Metz and Really Usefull Knwoledge, Reina Sofia, Madrid 

• Appreciate and articulate the ability of artworks to interrogate the way we teach and we learn.
• Grasp the potential of artworks to convey the distinction between art, research and entertainment.
• Understand the complex historicity of artworks –  and their changing meanings over time – as well as the role of the artist asan  active agent of social transformations.

• Approach artifacts beyond their aesthetic appeal, and examine them in relation to their cultural, social and political milieu.
• Formulate critical arguments about the interconnection – and distinction –  between art, research and entertainment.
• Problematize the changing forms of arts, its notion and the role of art institutions as learning centers.

• Lectures
• Company visits
• Practical Exercises
• Individual works / Assignments
• Collaborative Works / Assignments

This course combines traditional frontal teaching (lectures) with seminar-based activities and off-campus visits to exhibitions and cultural institutions when possible.

Image-based exercises and oral presentations (both individual and in group) are assigned through the course for attending students. Students are expected to participate in class discussions.

Students are required to take a final exam (50% of the grade). The exam is oral, and students are asked to answer a mix of open-ended and image-based questions. 50% of the grade is represented by an oral presentation (prepared individually or in group) on a topic of free choice (related to the course) and presented in class at the end of the course. 

The exam is based on course readings, as well as on seminar materials and discussions held in class. The exam aims to assess student engagement with and understanding of textual and visual evidence and their ability to interpret such evidence critically, showing and understanding new forms of arts and their effect in the politics of spectatorship as well as in the development of art institutions. 

Students are required to take a final exam (100% of the grade). The exam is oral, and students are asked to answer a mix of open-ended questions. The exam is based on a reading list (see relevant section). The exam aims to assess student’s familiarity with the main issues addressed by the assigned readings; their ability to summarize and critically interpret the narratives and arguments advanced by those readings. 

Bibliographic references: 

Jacques Ranciére, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford University press, 1991 

Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells (Introduction, cap. 7, 8, 9), Stanford University press, 1991

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology. Or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art?, Koenig Books 2013

Multimedia materials: 

Lesson pdfs - Video screening (in class) - course reserve readings

Oral exam on mandatory books: 

- Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford University press, 1991

- Claire Bisho p, Artificial Hells (Introduction, cap. 7, 8, 9) Stanford University press, 1991

- Egea Reader (for more details contact the course leader)