CULTURE, EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT

Abstract

The first part of this paper asks how European art education traditionally positions itself despite an ever-changing world, mainly in respect to the question how to teach cultural heritage. Focussing the history of art we can see that teaching the canon connected with development narratives is still dominant. But some trends can be observed that open the chance to further develop those traditions, e.g. focussing intercultural entanglements, transcultural understandings of ‘objects’ and including the issue of power. These trends try to provide answers to today's challenges. The inquiry finally leads to an analytical grid as a model to understand contemporary complexities in a better way.
 In the middle section, this is discussed in more detail using a concrete example, the political demands for the return of cultural heritage, the Benin bronzes that were stolen by British colonialists in Nigeria in the 19th century and are now mainly in European museums. It gets clear that the application of the model – developed in the first part – to this example reveals its limits, as unsolvable problems occur. The case study of the Benin bronzes triggers a set of new questions that are becoming increasingly important for art education – at least in Germany – but which have hardly been asked so far. Examples are: Who speaks? In which language? With whom? Who owns? Is negation a model for intercultural dialogue? Etcetera.
 In the last part, this set of questions is posed to a concrete international project with partners in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa that the author is co-ordinating at the Art of Fine Academy in Munich. The set of questions is used to critically explore this project in a way that could also be transferred to any other project in the field of art and cultural education in formal and non-formal settings.