People in art are “educated” all the time. First, we need to broaden our horizons and go beyond our own ideological frameworks in order to claim to know or describe the reality (or fantasy) of which art is a part. Secondly, the influx of new people into art happens, as it happens, primarily through an educational, practical or theoretical, barrier that allows us to somehow get a foothold in this world of art (or not). That is why the topic of art education will be relevant year after year, and September 1 is just a symbolic occasion to talk about it in more detail.

Despite the considerable number of educational initiatives that produce hundreds of artists each year, the community is repeatedly shaken by critical complaints about the quality of art education and the “product” it produces, as well as student frustration and the authoritarianism of the highest echelons of artistic “power. Against the backdrop of this criticism, one way or another, discussions are held, texts are produced, and intra-artistic gossip spreads. Nevertheless, the exponential growth of art schools of all stripes and formats raises with a new demandingness the questions: what kind of art education do we need? What tools and working models can we appropriate through the experience of history? Which formats are unworkable and must be unequivocally discarded?

I would divide all students interested in art education today into two categories: the artist-in-residence – that is, the one who is primarily interested in realization in the institutional, museum or gallery field of art, and the artist-outside – the one who cares about working with media and creating his or her own institutions, interacting with audiences without intermediaries and without being bound to existing hierarchies

Schools run and taught by “masters” who have absorbed the working methods of the past have difficulty adapting to changes in theory and practice, and instead of changing and evolving, they passively or aggressively defend their position as “connoisseurs. As a consequence of this rigidity of the system or its individual participants, students acquire selective knowledge, often in a distorted form – these gaps and problems, together with censorship and repression, force students and teachers to withdraw from established educational structures and seek new forms of both artistic activity and educational strategies – from their circles, courses, reading groups, offline and online schools to their own media, blogs and social media groups

The problem with my university experience, of course, was not the content at all, but the institutional structure of the institution itself, the educational infrastructure. At university I observed every day tired people who did not really like to do what they had to do. After working as a teacher for six months – I led online pairs for giant groups on “majors,” that is, required non-core elective courses – I myself turned into a tired person, who for some reason takes apart with dear colleagues Hannah Arendt prescribed by the program or supervisors. I also realized that fatigue is sometimes mistaken for rapid disappointment – a couple of students wrote that they would not be able to join a class today, and their mood immediately dropped (this, however, was more typical of non-university programs, in which I also taught).

For one thing, education is necessary in order to align oneself in protest to established practices. But maybe I chose the curatorial identity a few years ago precisely because there were no established practices – and this was a rare field, where one could not spend years destroying and overcoming inertia, but immediately build and try something unthinkable?

Second, education is necessary to justify the profession. I keep encountering opinions that a curator in theater is not needed at all or, on the contrary, that anyone who wants to be a curator in the theater field can take it on and be a curator. Education, relying on the authority vested in our society by universities, will put a grave slab over both of these positions. Moreover, education is likely to shape institutional positions, paid project positions, journals, and criticism. But are we not better off launching a transition to modes of legitimation that do not rely on rigid institutional structures such as universities?

Third, education is necessary to cement a minimum set of required knowledge and competencies for the job