Contemporary art requires that art and cultural educators reposition encounters with artefacts, images and performances into a context for new discourses. Whereas digital media and other aspects of visual popular culture predominate the frames of reference of school‐age children, their context (codes) of reference, in large part, do not contain those used by art and cultural education professionals. Most art professionals (con)textualise their interpretations from a more formalistic tradition, unlike school‐age children, whose use of iconographic elements from their experiential subcultures, are projected into the content of their visual encounters. In order to find relevancy for today's art education, interrelationships between the codes of the participant and visual experiences must be built upon the development of new strategies between viewers, artefacts and experts. This article presents the background and use of dialogic strategies for new discourse from the‘Open Dialogue Club’programme between the Department of Art Education at Charles University and the Galerie Rudolfinum, a contemporary art space, in Prague, Czech Republic.
This paper examines the onto‐epistemic status and understanding of contemporary material culture and of visual art, particularly in the context of gallery education. It does so through a case study of the response of 15 year‐old school students in the Czech Republic and in England to a recent photographic exhibition, I.N.R.I., created by artists Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly. It supports and develops further the proposition that the tradition grounded in the concept of a single ‘objective’ interpretation of a work of art has been significantly undermined by the paradigmatic change that has taken place in the last decades. In the course of this process the vocabulary of signification (e.g. doves, the royal blue, temptations of Christ, class struggle) inherited from the age of ideologies and grand narratives has been significantly weakened. In its place there emerged the vocabulary of signs born out of the language of high tech media. It takes the form of dynamically constituted units identifiable via daily exposure to techno processes, e.g. familiar from advertising and networking, at best mere fragments of traditional narratives. The recognition of reality is couched in terms of consumer units originating in objects (e.g. gadgetry) and object‐based practices filling (indeed constituting) the living place of today. This shift is particularly apparent among English young people, brought up in a more consumer‐oriented society, and to a lesser degree among Czechs. This is well in keeping with the concept of the post‐modern ‘empirical spectator’ developed in recent literature on art and material culture education.
Across Europe, educational institutions are essential in assisting exploration of politics, culture and history, and the use of creative arts appears crucial to supporting this aim. This article reports on Creative Connections, a multi-partner research project that facilitated exchanges for young people to explore their European identities using online art galleries and blogging technologies. Their multimodal conversations revealed an openness to consider artworks as sources of knowledge and experience. Participants did not focus on the nationality of the artist, but concentrated on the relationship that the subject matter of the work had with their own concerns. Anxiety related to populism, exclusive nationalism, social inequality and new forms of labour appeared to impact young European citizens’ relationships and their perceptions of democracy.
This paper describes a long-term art project. The programme has been developed and tested at Basic School, [l] Donovalska in Prague. We worked with the entire school population, including pupils with severe problems in areas of discipline, academic achievement and/or light brain dysfunction. The arts activities were based on a correlation between music and visual art.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.