Art Education and gaming after Contemporary Art

There is an ongoing discussion about a crisis, if not an end, of art. Intriguingly, it is not because of some deficiency; indeed, it is because art actually works all too well and all too smoothly. The ongoing discussion about art’s possible (or even desirable) end stems from its “proximity” to capitalist temporality (as has been argued by many theorists, including Bojana Kunst, Marina Vishmidt, Peter Osborne, Reza Negarestani, Armen Avanessian, and Suhail Malik).

Rather than proposing some sort of (post-contemporary) solution or a new revamping of the problem, I would like to focus on art education. In other words, if the contemporary (mode of operation) is no longer tenable as a framework for art—its universalizing logic, liberal consensus, and biennial culture now exposed as exhausted—then what becomes of art education? Art schools have long defined themselves in relation to "contemporary art," training students to navigate its discursive spaces, markets, and institutional circuits. But in the current situation, art education should explore a different orienting horizon and indeed consider art education itself as an endangered conceptual world.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, I will try to explore gaming cultures as providing the most topical medium of today (and its empire; Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford). I will try to explore identity-as-play, tactical theory, the utopia of control and attention, hellscapes vs. pastoral garden worldbuilding, and the genre of artwalks as components that could provide a different mediatic, cultural, and conceptual horizon for art and its education.