Art Education in the Age of Metrics. A critical exhibition about how we teach and learn at the University for the Creative Arts, UK

The higher education sector in the United Kingdom finds itself immersed in a data culture that evaluates every aspect of the university life according to a metrical paradigm. Art education, an area with its own teaching and learning characteristics, is particularly incompatible with a model that favours efficiency, productivity and success over all other aspects. In this essay I describe an exhibition, Art Education in the Age of Metrics, which took place in 2017 at the campus gallery of a specialist university located in the town of Canterbury. This was a curatorial project that tried not only to represent the difficulties of art education in the current climate, but that by engaging the university community—particularly students— in the process of organizing the exhibition, tried to actively intervene in the debates on the impact of this neoliberal model in how we teach and learn art today.