How to Teach Art?

A cooperative reflection on how to teach art.

How should art be taught? What kind of knowledge should artists absorb? How might an ordinary person become a creature addicted to the creative process? In other words, how can a non-artist become an artist? Such programmatic questions, articulated by acclaimed Polish artist Artur Żmijewski, were at the heart of the workshop How to Teach Art? Żmijewski invited a group of graduate and doctoral students from three Zurich universities—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the University of Zurich, and the Zurich University of the Arts—to collectively reflect on their artistic practices.

Over the course of four months, the group met several times a week for hourlong sessions, following individual and collective exercises induced by Żmijewski himself.

This book retraces the workshop and its process by showing inconclusive, fragmentary results between theory and practice. How to Teach Art? presents drawings, videos, photographs, 16mm films, and accompanying reflections on the central premise, “How to teach art?”