"If art in schools enables access to zones of freedom unavailable in other subject areas, then schools may offer art ideas about how to transcend its own limitations."
Dean Kenning
Ideally there would be a close symbiotic relationship. That seems to be the case in my immediate context, here in the small Mexican provincial capital of Guanajuato. What has your experience been in this regard, Willy?
This article shows how complex and useful this can be
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14714787.2013.816536
According to their meaning, art galleries are supposed to house artworks. They do so not only for their own sake but in order to present them to the public. This is their ontological role. On the other hand, art schools stand for the ‘’production’’ of art-makers who will eventually produce artworks and these will finally go into art galleries. This being said, how can we understand art galleries helping art schools?
Art galleries help art schools in the sense that art teacher can refer to the collections of the galleries in order to support his teaching. They also are source of inspiration for art students who will later become producers. That is the main reason why art schools own their collections or why universities in many countries (mainly English speaking ones) have an art gallery. This is the case on many campuses in the United States for instance. Art galleries also help by providing models for art-makers of the future.
While art galleries helping art schools can be perceived, how this help can turn to become a self-service for the galleries? To put it differently, how can the service provided by the galleries to schools can be beneficial for themselves? First of all, the students of the schools that enjoyed the collections in school sessions are likely to return to galleries and increase their gallery going time. Secondly, this will probably increase the income of the galleries. At the end of the process, the art students will also become gallery goers, art buyers, art collectors and art specialists. And all these activities are beneficial for galleries.
That is why one can not envisage this relation between art galleries and art schools without thinking of the audiences. This is a triptych that should not be disconnected if one wants to have a holistic understanding of the art field.
Thanks Emery Patrick for this contribution.
Trying to answer your question : "How can the service provided by the galleries to schools can be beneficial for themselves? "
I quote Dean Kenning:
"Schools offer art the opportunity to enter the social sphere – to escape
from a confined cultural arena and to direct its potentialities beyond
the limiting agendas of individual competitiveness and the market.
(...) This opens art to issues and opinions beyond a comfort zone of homogeneous tastes, critical stances and political points of view.
- The engagement with schools acts to transform the production and distribution of art, both by enabling routes into art for a wider mix of individuals and by changing the conception of an artist from an absent symbolic presence, to an active human presence occupying the same non-exalted space as the audience.
- It may be that the difficulties and objections are a sign of how existing art world structures and values have become an impediment to the further progressive development of the public gallery’s function.
In this respect shifting from a secondary mediating role to a primary productive role is about more than education departments gaining autonomy within the gallery or museum; it is about art itself gaining autonomy by becoming free from the institutional structures that hold back its ability to act critically in the world.
If art in schools enables access to zones of freedom unavailable in other subject areas, then schools may offer art ideas about how to transcend its own limitations."
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