olafur's new gig

Open Studio - Artist Olafur Eliasson’s forthcoming professorship at Berlin’s Universität der Künste will be an experiment in art education // excerpts from frieze online

...So why is it necessary for Eliasson’s ‘participants’ to work and learn in his building rather than in the designated spaces UdK provides? According to the artist: ‘There is a fundamental difference between being with an artist in a studio and being with a professor in an academy.’ Eliasson describes the tradition of sequestering students in an academy as ‘dogmatic, static and conservative’ and believes the learning environment doesn’t have to be a ‘cocoon’; he wants his school to be ‘closer to the street, closer to reality’...
‘I’m very conventional in the way I work and create objects in my studio – I always love to say that I am mainstream.’ His programme will have a formal educational structure, with a reading list ranging from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin (2005)...
Though Eliasson admires artists who never went to art school, he nevertheless thinks that art education is increasingly important. ‘The world is just so fucked up that it seems desperately to need art around. I think the participants will take away from the school the potential of being productive participants in the world. And I think this requires a sense of responsibility and precision. I hope they’ll learn to be a part of the world or “with the world”. Whether they then claim to be artists is completely beside the point’...

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sounds like an interesting experiment in teaching but I wonder if the students will benefit from his "studio" teachings. art school usually has the reputation of not really educating students on what it will really be like in the "real art world" but then again I wouldn't want to take that time out of really learning about making art. I think if olafur's class is in conjunction with some formal teaching/critiques then the program will be successful. sometimes though, the best teachers are the less than perfect artists themselves.