Art education has lost none of its meaning as much as any other. Even Joseph Beuys, who ingrained the famous formula “every man is an artist,” was a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy and treasured his right to teach people how, from his point of view, art should be made.

It’s about the adequacy of education to the demands of our time. Academic art education is incredibly conservative. Most of the professors in our academies do not know and aggressively do not want to know and understand what happened to art in the 20th century.

If we were to transfer this to the field of, say, medicine, they would be doctors who believe that modern medicine has gone down the wrong path and therefore insistently teach their students to treat all diseases with bloodletting and tobacco enemas. It sounds absurd, but nothing changes, because we still have both academics and ministers and housewives surprisingly unanimous in the opinion that an artist is one who can draw, period.

For the latter point, of course, it would be nice to be able to draw. Although one can also take pictures, make videos or movies, dance, work with light, sound or any other means of expression, which is something that art students in our reality are not only not offered, but are forbidden to do. But the most tragic thing is that our education completely lacks the first two positions – a good humanitarian education and critical thinking. It means that even if an artist can hold a brush or a pencil in his hands (which is also far from being guaranteed), he has absolutely nothing to say to an audience that is often much more educated than he is.

I think it is very important to approach art education reform with a cool head. First of all, to realize all the positive aspects of our conservative system, which are not few, and to try to keep them. At the same time it is vital to significantly expand the academic program with new practical courses and various humanities disciplines.

But there is another very important aspect that is often overlooked. Art education – much more than any other – is based entirely on the personality of the teacher. I would like to see more personalities in Ukrainian academies who, on the one hand, are able and willing to teach, and on the other, have a relationship to the actual artistic process.

For example, if we are talking about education in fashion design, it is extremely important to teach students basic skills: fashion design, idea generation, design and product development, business planning, financial management, branding, PR and sales. Often students are taught only design, engineering, or even less. They are lucky if they are taught how to produce technical drawings of designs, but they often leave college with no drawing or drafting skills.

Business should be taught side by side with design. Imagine a student walking out into the big mean world with little or no idea. And as soon as he gets out of college, the support ends, and in fact, that’s when he needs it most. This is the reason why many designers fail when they leave educational centers and try to create a business. They have no idea how to market their product and get stuck. They harbor fantasies about working in the glamorous industry and are surprised by the harsh reality. To start their own line, designers need to have an understanding of the key elements of financial planning and management.

I would divide art education into three components: training in the craft – artists, sculptors, and graphic artists; training in professional disciplines of art – art historians, curators, art critics, and art financiers; and cultural education – education of people for whom art objects are created, exhibitions are organized, albums and monographs are published. To each segment the world practice has its own approach, which has to be adopted.

An artist’s education includes Self-Promotion, which allows you to adapt to the market while studying: how to create a portfolio, a website, communicate with galleries and collectors, which trends to pay attention to, seeking professional growth. It is obligatory to send art historians and curators to the big museums like MoMA and Tate Modern for summer trainings, because they can get the value of a curator or a ticket inspector by their own example. Afterwards they will never come to a museum putting their leg over and saying: “I am a curator, the rest stay quiet”. The world universities also have the practice of inviting specialists from outside the field of art to master classes, but in communication with whom unexpected intersections can open up. In my practice, the head of the French soccer union invited to a museum forum immediately received a cooperation proposal from the Louvre, and his stories about fundraising gave an impulse to a number of European museums to implement similar schemes.