Contemporary art and children

Possibilities and challenges of the education of visual art appreciation in exhibitions and art fairs

Associate Prof. Zoltan Somhegyi

Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest

Abstract：Both art history and visual art appreciation are among the subjects that are the most joyful and at the same time also most challenging to teach. The great achievements of classical artists and the spectacular new works of contemporary creators can be highly inspiring, but – if not being taught with care – it can also become a boring subject, or, what’s worse, an area of study and activity of which importance or even legitimacy is questioned, even by the students themselves. Therefore, teachers of art history and of visual art appreciation have a particular responsibility of bringing these fascinating subjects close to children in an exciting and careful manner, through which instructors can trigger a sensibility towards the arts that can have an impact and last, ideally, for an entire lifetime.

In my paper I aim to show some aspects of these questions. I focus especially on the case studies of museum pedagogy and activities of visual art appreciation in contemporary art exhibitions and art fairs – for example guided tours specially dedicated to children during these events. In this way, the focus of the paper is given on the particularities of such extra-classroom activities that can provide the children and students with a great opportunity to really encounter art in its physicality, in other words of having a direct experience of artworks, of their physical features, their emotional effect and aesthetic qualities, instead of knowing them merely through reproductions in books or having them projected on the screen.

My choice of focusing on contemporary art is motivated by the fact that it is unfortunately an often neglected area when discussing the history of art in general education – sometimes because of its challenging nature or controversial topics and untraditional forms of expression, due to which even teachers may find it more complicated to bring contemporary artworks into the class discussion. An inspiring way to offer an alternative for this dilemma can be a visit, with the help of specialized guides, in a contemporary art event. Nevertheless, such visits may also have their own challenges, and they cannot be considered as an automatic solution for a comprehensive overview that can “entirely” substitute the proper teaching and more classical forms of discussion of contemporary art, but they are definitely a curious way of arousing and increasing the students’ interest in contemporary art, that will then help instructors in continuing the subject in classical in-class teaching.