Samenvatting

Art and design professions are currently undergoing major transformations. Perhaps for the first time in history, Western art education is no longer naturally linked to stabilising norms within the professional creative practice. During the past few decades, art education has been unable to adapt sufficiently to shifting global economic and cultural realities. Neither has it been able to catch up with the new technological requirements which its graduates must face. The nature of the public has changed as well: consumers have become co-creators, while do-it-yourself culture increasingly challenges the role of the artist as the authoritative creative professional. Meanwhile, service design and project-based practices which exist on the boundaries between traditional fields of knowledge are becoming as important as artistic work in the conventional sense. Therefore art education will have to undergo a radical transformation, if it is to go on playing a meaningful role in the 21st century. The contributors to this volume are executives and researchers at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, in the Netherlands.