In this book, Gert Biesta presents a new approach to contemporary art education by showing the unique possibilities the arts offer to establish a dialogue with the world around us. This approach to art education is based on teaching as a process of showing, where the teacher shows the student what could be good, important or meaningful to master in the world. As a starting point for illustrating this method, the book proposes 'How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare' (1965) by Joseph Beuys, wh...

'Ema (Nude on a staircase)' pulls the reader into the mind of Ema, the young woman descending the staircase in Gerhard Richter's 1966 painting, 'Ema'. Ema is a young artist who wants to discover what her greatest form of creativity is. She embarks on a journey of awakening, a quest for mastery that brings her into dialogue with her teachers and with her great mentors, the artists Gerhard Richter, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Ema explores her field, finds her own voice, considers the world an...

Le poème électronique is generally known as the multimedia event presented in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair of 1958. The visual part of the Poème was conceived by the architect and painter Le Corbusier. He was also responsible, in partnership with Iannis Xenakis, for the design of the Philips Pavilion. The musical part consisted of a short electronic piece composed by Xenakis that was played as the public entered the space and an eight-minute electronic work by Edgard V...