This proposal is born out of the perception of certain disenchantment with the current state of affairs of education in art schools. The conviction is an assumption based on the scattered feeling identified in both the art world and the art education communities (sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don’t), ranging from published materials in books, journals and the internet to exhibition and biennial epigraphs.

Nevertheless this impression is not new and old are the discomforts that surround the issue of artists’ training, with these having an obvious tendency for a troubled relationship with schooling. The turmoil arising is historical and can be traced further back than Modernism, with a prominent place for the Romantic volition which was highly committed in making the artist an isolated and self-educated individual. The point was accurately that of praising individuality, and against it started to stand the institutionalized art world, from critique to exhibition spaces and, likewise, schools. Here I argue the troubled relationship between art education and art practice may have begun as a generalized anti-institutionalization position of artists, considering the suspicious way they regarded other art agents’ activity by the end of the XVIIIth century. Oped this dawn of the Romantic spirit, here introductory to my particular viewpoint, we can focus more on the educational environment taken as a site of awkwardness and discommodity avoided by artists until the first half of the XXth century. This is when things started to change, and from a preceding anti-academic position, artists earned jobs as professors in the American university. It was not long until Europe reacted to such change in artists’ subjectivity. The first part of this proposal aims to analyze the rout of artists meeting art schools since the modernist attitude until their actual feeling towards their training.
The second part, although intimately related to the first, sets eyes on the present situation of discontentment and is particularly interested in what considers being one of the many possible reactions to the disappointing picture. That is the recent series of ‘alternative art schools’ emerging a bit everywhere in the current context of Bologna, where collaboration, interdisciplinarity  and mobility are encouraged as features of a renewed curriculum. An overview of these projects, historically contextualized, is intended in order to select the most significant ones, considering the curricula provided, the educational framework and the political intents. With the two arguments introduced in this abstract, the author aspires to understand how the recent narrative of ‘alternative art schools’ is impacting the contested established art school.

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