Views on Art Education
In my opinion, the principles of art education should emerge from our appreciation, exploration, and understanding of the art’s subjects, achievements, consequences, and potentials in relation to all aspects of human existence. Art education should embody and help develop the principal skills of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, working smart, and learning how to learn. In a broader prospect, it should also apply these skills to define cogent strategies for addressing global challenges.
However, the deteriorating strategic role and financial backing of education since the 1980s have caused the erosion of academic autonomy and integrity. This often leads to obedient institutional policies which regress the educational process from a synergetic coevolution of intensive learning practices and diverse research directives into a routine social service, homogenized by current economic trends and myopically focused on vocational training. These policies foster technocentrism in the arts and humanities and STEAM programs, which largely remain unconcerned with solving the contradictions and opposing world views of the two fields they strive to integrate: postmodernism in the arts and humanities and modernism in STEM. At the same time, university-incorporated art schools tend to enforce inappropriate academic progress evaluation mechanisms cloned from the STEM sector, thus affecting their faculties’ work as educators, researchers, and artists. Art education also reflects sociopolitical inequalities, cultural hegemonies, institutional privileges, profit-driven power games, and capricious reputation economies that dominate the art community. The institutional efforts to recognize, assess, and cultivate students’ artistic talent seldom match the bureaucratic work invested in knowledge transfer, administration, and program/institution promotion. Responsible art education institutions should address these issues systematically and sincerely to examine, critique, and correct their human-based flaws and biases rather than opportunistically serve the current political dictates or economic demands. They should encourage an open-minded experimental approach and empower students’ technical skills with broader theoretical knowledge, appreciation, and deeper practical understanding of the arts and related disciplines. This requires art educators to be honestly devoted and proactive in their advocacy for quality, integrity, and equity of education as a keystone of our civilization.
Throughout my career, I have learned to appreciate the privilege of being an artist and researcher and to respect the responsibilities of an educator. Every human has the right to explore the arts in any preferred mode of engagement: from pursuing a professional career to enjoying the casual enrichment of everyday life. Therefore, art education should epitomize high professional standards based on diversity, inclusivity, and justice. However, academic study is neither a multi-year entertainment package nor a pragmatic vocational tutorial; it requires dedication, open-mindedness, and humility toward the achievements of the field and the awareness of one’s capacity for change through learning. As the arts have evolved into a complex network of interests, skillsets, practices, and contexts for expression and meaning-making, studying art requires courage, persistence, patience, and passion from all involved actors: students, faculty, staff, and administrators. The point of studying art is cultivating one’s wonder, care, interest, and means for creative exploration and expression as a uniquely human faculty. Artists advance through individuation, reflection, and problem-solving by continuously empowering their talent with hard work, reasoning, and learning the practical, technical, and theoretical aspects of their creative interests. This is why, in every academic environment, students are highly responsible for the quality and outcomes of their education and should be encouraged to appreciate and leverage that fact.
As the arts have evolved into a complex network of interrelated interests, skillsets, methods, practices, and contexts for expression and meaning making, studying art also requires courage, persistence, patience, and passion from all involved actors: students, faculty, staff, and administrators. The point of studying art is to cultivate our wonder, care, and interest for exploring art as a unique human faculty, so the prime condition for studying (art) successfully is learning how to learn. An artist advances through individuation, reflection, and problem-solving, by continuously empowering their talent with hard work, reasoning and learning the practical, technical and theoretical features of their relevant art interest. This is why, in every academic environment, art students are highly responsible for the quality and outcomes of their education.
Teaching Interests
My teaching centers around the experimental interplay between art, science/technology, and society that initiates meaningful transformations of human experience. I have taught drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, generative art, interactive art, computational art, experimental animation, sound art, and game art. With a keen interest in these disciplines' interdisciplinary and emergent values, I am enthusiastic about and critical of their expressive potentials, cultural contexts, ethical values, and political implications. My teaching of these subjects is based upon exploring their poetic and epistemic scopes and studying their historical and contemporary contexts combined with mastering creative tools and techniques in various media environments, scales, and degrees of complexity. Its primary goal is to provide students with frameworks for understanding conceptual and theoretical layers of diverse artistic strategies through a well-informed critical assessment.
Methodology and Teaching Style
Flexibility, adaptability, anticipation, and proactive innovation define my teaching methodology. It is founded on exploratory learning emphasizing the inventive use of various technical systems for responsible artmaking and for gaining deep insights into its communicative powers and sociopolitical impacts. My teaching style is expansive and collaborative, exposing students to ideas from the arts, science, technology, philosophy, and popular culture. The focus is on developing effective research and production techniques, learning skills, and building competencies to create cogent, engaging, and socially relevant artworks. I achieve this by fostering intellectually open experimentation with critical thinking, assessment, evaluation, and communication in individual and collaborative student work.
Alumni
The students I had taught and mentored have been pursuing successful careers as artists, designers and academics. Some of them are Vladimir Todorović, Blake Marques Carrington, Dylan Moore, Ján Skaličan, Denis Kozerawski, Laurel Severin, Slavica Panić, Ivan Grubanov, Nemanja Nikolić, Isidora Krstić, Nina Ivanović, Aljoša Ninković, Ana Nedeljković, Damjan Kovačević, Jelena Vitorović, Nataša Stojanović, Ana Banduka, Deana Petrović, Martina Petrović, Aleksandra Kovačević, Julijana Protić, Jelena Nikolić, Veljko Onjin, DigitGroup and Dragana Grbić.