Today, as we create art together with a nonhuman agent called artificial intelligence, the ontology of art is once again being put into question. At the same time, the superficial and short-lived stimuli offered by a technological condition in which the digital has become fully foregrounded seem, paradoxically, to call for a return to a more classical model of arts education—one that seeks liberation from machines and the recovery of direct contact with (natural) materiality. To explore the possibility of an arts education theory that can traverse—and encompass—these two diagnoses and perspectives that appear to conflict, this study places at its center the Object-Oriented Ontology of the new materialist philosopher Graham Harman (1961–). Harman provides a conceptual framework for understanding artistic practices in the AI era that cannot be captured by the human–world binary, while continuing to insist on art’s distinctiveness and autonomy.

Harman (2020) ultimately argues for the aesthetic autonomy of the compound entity formed by things—including artworks—and their beholders. He overturns a modern worldview in which the world is meaningful because humans perceive it and confer meaning upon it, and he recognizes not only beings beyond the reach of human sensation but also the relations that obtain among those beings. In doing so, he seeks to capture honestly the character of art as a practice of treating the things of the world more justly. From this perspective, Harman’s discussion appears capable of offering a persuasive concept of art and an aesthetic theory through which one can speak of art’s educational significance on the new horizon opened by human–nonhuman relations. This claim seems educationally compelling in two main respects.

First, it concerns the question of how to treat objects more justly. Art and arts education have often been justified as sensuous humanistic education that restores humanity or as civic education that expands social and public values. Yet, despite their differences, these accounts commonly retain an anthropocentric stance toward objects and environments. Does treating things justly, then, mean abandoning the human perspective altogether? That would be nearly impossible. Harman proposes a third approach. By carefully differentiating human modes of relating to objects, he rejects the reduction of things to their components, functions, or effects—as if explanatory knowledge were equivalent to the thing itself. Instead, he emphasizes a cognitive form without knowledge, in which one attempts to feel sensuously the quality of the real object (Real-Object) that cannot be exhausted by conceptual grasp. (Harman, 2020: 28)

Second, Harman rearticulates art’s autonomy by discussing art as ontology beyond the sphere of human action alone. For him, autonomy does not reside in the artwork as an isolated entity; it emerges when artwork and beholder form a hybrid situation. This is a moment of ontological encounter in which an object is neither instrumentalized nor merely represented. It opens not through what is already known or explained about the thing, but through an effort to register its qualitative force directly. Harman describes such moments as experiences of beauty, understood as an explicit tension between a withdrawn real object and its vivid sensuous qualities. (Harman, 2020: 22, 97)

Finally, this study takes the Teshima Art Museum in Japan as a case that exemplifies aesthetic autonomy as a human–object compound. Analyzing this experience from Harman’s ontology of art, the study clarifies the educational meaning of (1) form that exceeds human subjectivity and (2) the importance of fragmentary depth against digitally accelerated perception. In doing so, it aims to articulate arts education not only as a modern pedagogical contribution but also as an ontological practice of forming a more just relationship with things.

1. Argumentation through literature analysis By applying Graham Harman’s argumentative structure—one that places aesthetics as first philosophy—to the educational domain, this study aims to derive theoretical principles for how arts education can enact the core ontological claim that there are beings that exist independently of humans. For example, whether the object in question is a digital device or a physical book, the existential sense of co-existing with other beings arises not when we are separated from things, but when we combine with things to become a new hybrid and, as this new object, acquire a certain autonomy. To develop this argument, the study analyzes how Harman differentiates his position from Martin Heidegger, who also speaks of art’s educational meaning in ontological terms, and from Immanuel Kant, who treats form as something that can be grasped only within human subjectivity. Through this line of reasoning, the study seeks to translate and clarify—in educational language—the meaning of such autonomy as a newly formed compound. Ultimately, it aims to formalize (arts) educational principles capable of cultivating a sense of existence within educational timespaces where nonhuman entities operate in ways different from before. 2. Illustrating abstract concepts through a case Since Harman’s work is commonly classified within speculative realism, the development of this study—aimed at proposing its meaning for arts education—requires the task of concretely exemplifying abstract concepts through an appropriate case. For this purpose, the study takes the case of the Teshima Art Museum on Japan’s Teshima Island and will describe how an experience of beauty—an experience of autonomy as a compound of human and artwork—can be presented. The museum appears to exemplify particularly well such autonomy as a compound. Through this case, the study will illustratively elucidate the meaning of a new form in Harman’s sense that exceeds the subjective dimension of the human, the characteristics of the conditions under which aesthetic experience can be possible even without an artwork, and the meaning and importance of fragmentary depth. It will then clarify what educational implications this has beyond the modern contributions typically attributed to arts education—namely, what it means for arts education to function as an ontology of forming a just relationship with things.

First, this study explains the experience at the Teshima Art Museum through Harman’s theory as an instance of aesthetic autonomy achieved as a compound. The museum’s curatorial design and formal configuration symbolically and almost perfectly realize the idea that the beholder’s participation is a principal component of art. For this reason, it offers a particularly apt example for showing how aesthetic autonomy does not arise from a modern mode of judgment that separates beholder and object, but rather from their coupling—how the beholder and the object, as a compound, can possess autonomy. Second, the study will clarify how its account of art’s educational meaning differs from earlier approaches that sought the value of art outside aesthetic experience. Harman tends to regard much conceptual and political contemporary art as appealing to values external to art itself (Harman, 2020: 403). Interpreting this claim educationally is significant for the present discussion. It suggests that arguing for the value of arts education under the banner of civic education or humanistic education risks appealing to something “outside” art; instead, it reminds us that we should press more carefully and precisely into what occurs within art, namely the experience of the feeling of beauty. Finally, this study proposes the educational implications of Object-Oriented Ontology as the cultivation of a desire to sense the real even when it cannot be directly reached. For Harman, the feeling of beauty can be connected to the disclosure of the depth of the real object. In a present in which we are repeatedly urged to settle for minor and continually arriving sensory pleasures, this perspective leads to a pressing educational question: what kinds of sensuous experiences can guide children toward treating beings more justly? And in order to do so, how must their experiences of beauty be trained and deepened?

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