In this book, Gert Biesta presents a new approach to contemporary art education by showing the unique possibilities the arts offer to establish a dialogue with the world around us. This approach to art education is based on teaching as a process of showing, where the teacher shows the student what could be good, important or meaningful to master in the world. As a starting point for illustrating this method, the book proposes 'How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare' (1965) by Joseph Beuys, wh...

The fourth instalment of the ‘Teaching Objects’ series revolves around “Creation”. In this art novella the reader is guided by Lisa, a young artist who is facing death. A dialogue with four works by the American painter Cy Twombly emerges from the question of life’s duration, and Lisa discovers the secret of creative speech. The protagonist’s thoughts bring her to Gaeta, a seaside town near Velia, the ancient Greek town in Italy, now named Elea – the place where the school of Pa...

How to navigate the rapidly changing digital geopolitics of the world today? How do we make sense of digital transformation and its many social, political, cultural, and environmental implications at different locations around the world? Vertical Atlas brings together the insights of a diverse group of internationally renowned artists, scientists and technologists from different backgrounds and places. This book is a tool that enables comparisons, connections and contradictions between differ...

'Ema (Nude on a staircase)' pulls the reader into the mind of Ema, the young woman descending the staircase in Gerhard Richter's 1966 painting, 'Ema'. Ema is a young artist who wants to discover what her greatest form of creativity is. She embarks on a journey of awakening, a quest for mastery that brings her into dialogue with her teachers and with her great mentors, the artists Gerhard Richter, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Ema explores her field, finds her own voice, considers the world an...

Most of Marc Boumeester's thinking falls under affect theory, a philosophy of a new generation, which in its turn is fueled by Deleuzian scholarship. Boumeester formulates new and contemporary concepts that can be put into action in art and design education through an operational style called "intensive thinking". In the book, many interesting examples of educational programmes and works of art are accompanied by images relating to how this theoretical approach can be applied in art and desig...