Art Curriculum: Reflections, Discussions, and Concerns

Abstract

This essay problematizes the resistance processes present in art school curricula. Some curricula are legitimized by the constant emphasis on sequentiality and chronological succession grounded in the history of art, which often comes only from a scholarly conception centered on the work and life of consecrated artists over the centuries, or rereading of works of art. Besides that most of the school curricula are guided by textbooks that legitimize the continuity of these practices, privileging elitist, ideological, sequential aspects that may exclude other artistic manifestations. There is an imposition of good or bad art. There are several discourses in Art that can produce operations and subjectivations of bodies in and out of school, demanding new ways for subjects to be in and out of the classroom in order to produce resistance in curricula and school spaces as a whole. This essay calls these processes urgencies. It is understood that these urgencies are in conflict and have the power to create reliefs with what is legitimized by the school system as a curriculum in Art. In this process, there is a flow of forces between what is put, the status quo and the urgencies, implying lifestyles, aesthetic choices and the construction of discourses, people, bodies, as well as attitudes, actions and ways of walking, speak and behave, that is, ways of managing life that operate in the processes of subjectivation. This essay deals with the resistance that permeates the art curriculum at school, in view of the curricular conceptions already legitimized by the system.