Art and education: dialogues and antagonisms

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between art and education as a complex and hard-to-navigate territory, due to the uneven nature of these two spheres of cultural production.
Based on the acknowledgment of this fundamental difference, the mutual demands of art and education become problematic and often reach a critical status.
Therefore we propose an eccentric path to artistic education. A path that doesn't start with the usual axioms of these spheres, but that goes through the rapprochements with education that the art world proposes.
These rapprochements have been paradoxical since they demand from, and at the same time discredit, pedagogy: a practice that is considered a space with transformation power but that is often detached from educative institutions since they are considered authoritarian and reproductive.
Since this criticism comes from a discourse foreign to artistic education, it becomes an external workframe that challenges aspects that a community that shares practices and meanings usually takes for granted. Therefore, it highlights contradictions and unforeseen possibilities.
However, the arguments of this criticism must be questioned because of its aversion to education and its denial of the complexity and diversity of school.
Finally, based on this discussion, and inspired by examples of projects that sail between an educative and an artistic context, this article explores the pedagogical possibilities that come up when these contexts are considered in all their productive, not reductionist, distinctiveness.