Higher education is responsible for providing students with comprehensive knowledge. Art education, as part of the journey to become an artist, brings its own challenges today because the academic atmosphere has been heavily influenced by traditional theoretical aesthetics frameworks or arts theory. Learning and teaching methods that capture reality’s images as lived phenomena may not have been adequately developed to respond to the spread of visual culture. If art knowledge is to be made more comprehensive, an imaginative worldview is needed to enrich the learning and teaching methods of art education. In this essay, visual culture is analysed phenomenologically to go beyond visual intelligence towards an imaginative culture. An ‘imagerial’ sensitivity needs to be cultivated in the minds of art students and teachers in higher education by giving them space to experience art through their encounters with the world in its realness. This essay correlates the classical understanding of visuality in art and the phenomenology of visual culture to offer a refreshed perspective for developing methods in art education. Art students and teachers are witnesses of reality, presenting reality’s images and conversing their cultural perspectives of artworks as events.
Hadrianus Tedjoworo (Tue,) studied this question.