In Oriol’s own words, Art Lovers “presents two projects [
Aníbal Parada
] that intend to generate debate around artistic practice itself, as well as develop in complicity with agents that have usually been considered peripheral in the definition of meanings of contemporary art: museum audiences, art students, amateurs, collectors… in short, the figures who, named with such a saccharine term as “art lovers”, have actually tended to be reserved an absolutely subjugated position in relation to the development of the artistic sector.[…] Thus, in contrast to the reverential and obedient attitude, often silent and distinguished, that museum audiences have been encouraged to adopt towards art, Art Lovers attempts to give rise to other types of approaches to this practice. […]”
And that’s where, in principle, we come into action regarding the subordinate role of art education within the gears of the art world. The truth is that, increasingly, initiatives are being promoted that directly relate the context of art with that of education, especially through the presence and collaboration of artists in educational centers (a model recurrently cited by cultural technicians is that of the English
Creative Partnerships
). A topic for debate will undoubtedly be the validity of this model and the alternatives that can be proposed.
By the way, the debate is presented under a very simple question: “what do an exhibition hall and an educational center have in common?“. A possible answer, off the cuff, is that both are disciplinary places and control centers of knowledge, institutions in charge of the production and reproduction of valid knowledge. From here we can pull the thread as much as we want, and question whether certain current artistic strategies (of the artists themselves and of the art institution) are capable or not of subverting this type of process.
Just add that, although tangentially, today’s talk is based on Aníbal Parada’s proposal for the Art Lovers project, which consists of tearing down one of the walls of the exhibition hall of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the
University of Barcelona
. We will not go into evaluating this action here, we reserve ourselves for this afternoon -if necessary- but it should be noted that a lively debate has been set up on the blog of L’Espai d’Arts de Roca Umbert between and with the students of IES Celestí Ballera about the proposal after the visit of Aníbal himself to the institute.