Education in art galleries as an emerging field of artistic education in non-formal contexts

Abstract

This article deals with the possibility of performing didactic activities, directed to a wide audience, in Spanish contemporary art galleries. We consider the educational function of museums as a close field, and in order to accurate the analysis, we study several galleries across Britain that already carry out didactic actions as part of their regular activity. The goal is to detect common features in the activities they perform, to observe the groups to which they are addressed and to unveil the underlying thinking that governs their functioning, in addition to determining substantial differences between galleries education and museum education. Finally, from the extracted data, a comparison with the national art galleries is established and the fundamental characteristics of what we called “didactics in the art gallery” are determined, concluding that the contemporary art galleries that combine a commercial function, together with publicity and education, constitute an emerging context for art education.