Cultural arts education faces new challenges in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, where all forms of offline learning in schools are eliminated. Cultural arts teachers are faced with a lot more problems because the curriculum 2013 still sticks to the competency of artwork skills. Also, the current cultural arts education curriculum explicitly no longer includes art appreciation and artistic expression in the achievement of competency in learning arts and culture. Art in education basically seeks to take advantage of unique artistic activities, which in education are used to shape children into full human beings who also develop emotional intelligence. Art appreciation activities teach empathy and foster a sense of emotion, helping to build new imaginations in the form of aesthetic and artistic experiences. Thus, art learning based on art appreciation is considered to be the most effective way to solve the problems of learning arts and culture online.
 Keywords: art appreciation, emotional intelligence, empathy, aesthetic creativity, artistic creativity