Contemporary Art in Museums and parks. Aesthetics and Education

This paper aims to join two quite separate research perspectives and methodologies, factually originating in very diverse academic fields. In our knowledge, Philosophy of education and Environmental economics rarely cross their research paths and educational praxis. Nevertheless, or actually for this, the authors found a reciprocal strong incentive to compare their ideas and theses, for the necessity to question the validity of diverse research approaches related to the link between art and education. The paper focuses on contemporary art as the theoretic ground to critically discuss the novelty of artistic ideas and their impact on traditional disciplinary positions. Taking into account a broad socio-educative context, the analysis moves on to explore the nature of spaces such museums as well as the nature of physical or cultural borders invented to divide inner and outer worlds. Is an aesthetic/educative experience meaningful only within a delimited area? Can we say that by posing borders, we are able to improve our art making skills or our teaching competences? The museum space, therefore, symbolizes the porosity of the border between inside and outside, between the self and the other, the familiar and the alien, the right and the improper, referring to soul, body, home and community. The question to raise then is, in view of an educative experience, how difficult should be the accessibility to museums to generate the awareness of an aesthetic feel? The museum represents the force of provocation: one must be learned to enter it and to overcome its border, in order to exit it fully conscious of a meaningful experience. Along with the theoretical perspectives, the paper also presents the analysis of two case-studies of open-air museums: the Fattoria di Celle (in the province of Pistoia/Tuscany), which hosts one of the most valuable private collections of contemporary art in Tuscany, and the institution Tusciaelecta, which organizes, in the Chianti region, open-air exhibition of notable works of contemporary art.