'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...

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...

'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...