Arts Education Beyond Art: Teaching Art In Times Of Change

The discussion on art education is often about experiences, emotions, and technical skills, opposed to concepts on the critical function of the arts in society, on stages of cognitive development, and on evidence-based research into arts-participation, articulated by social scientists. The time seems ready for a shift in artistic consciousness, in which the focus changes from qualities of the artefact to qualities of the embodied cognitive and social processes. Teaching art, either to children or to adults, will have to focus on the qualities of the processes generated by the artistic artefacts, and on these objects as means to an end.