Over the last decade, art education has been confronted time and again with neoliberal thought and attitudes. As a result of this, art education has turned slowly but surely into a specific product focused on quantifiable and verifiable end results manifested and legitimized by the rhetoric of marketing and efficiency. In most semester programs, only limited time and space slots—if any at all—are reserved for higher emancipatory values such as a critical process of self-enlightenment or experimental, speculative thinking and associating.
Although the debate on artistic research indeed demands space for a free artisticspace for thought, it also seems necessary now to raise the question regarding the potential of educational platforms outside the Bologna rules. The 1st Tbilisi Triennial (Offside Effect, Tbilisi 2012), curated by Henk Slager and Wato Tsereteli, concentrated on this specific issue. In a forum-like display system, a number of keynote artists (among others Anton Vidokle, Stephan Dillemuth, Marion von Osten) and lecturers in collaboration with their students from a dozen of experimental academies from all over the world presented their strategic ways of working.
