Art and television have always been a painful combination in the Netherlands. Thanks to AVRO broadcasters and the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, television has a whole slew of art commentators, but a worthy successor to Pierre Jansen is not yet among them.
Nowadays art academies are no longer simply institutes for art education, but places where art is received, produced, collected and distributed. The idea of the open academie has consequences for art, the practice of exhibition making, and art education itself.
The emergence of the academy in the exhibition circuit is connected with the popularity of ‘relational aesthetics’. Pursuing contact may well have led to a lot of talk in the exhibition circuit, but a genuinely critical dialogue has been lacking until now. It’s more a question of talking for talking’s sake. According to Robert Garnett, ‘the exhibition as academy’ is weighed down by a threatening academicism. It’s time to disrupt the prevailing relationships.
With all the talk about academies exceeding boundaries it’s perhaps a good idea, when all is said and done, to look at things simply. At least, it would be good if that were possible. Here we have the school, an art school if you like, and there, a bit further on, is the outside world. Simple enough, you might think.
