Routes for aspiring artists and designers wanting to join an arts school

13 - 15 March 2019

Hosted by Beaux-Arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire, France

We would like to thank the delegates, speakers, moderators, researchers, partners, and our dear host and co-organiser Beaux-Arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire for their dedicated contributions and for the inspiring seminar days in Nantes & Saint Nazaire. 

The interest in art studies worldwide has generated such enthusiasm that numbers are growing each year, to the point that a real traffic jam has been created at the point of entry. This has resulted in increasingly selective admission policies being put in place resulting in competition between applicants, between schools and the creation of a multitude of preparatory programmes. These programmes have lengthened the period of study and paradoxically fostered a tendency towards standardisation.

How do we deal with these phenomena? What answers can we provide to students’ demands, aspirations and contingencies? How do we provide the necessary selection processes, yet remain open and diverse. On what criteria and objectives are these processes based? How can we provide clarity and transparency and still retain a rich landscape of preparatory programmes to our art schools?

These and more questions were at the core of the ELIA Regional Seminar, hosted by and co-organised at the initiative of Beaux-Arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire, on 13-15 March 2019.

During this event, leaders, academics, artists, professionals and intellectuals from European and international higher arts institutions came together to actively discuss and analyse the models that have been developed, in France and Europe in the last two decades. The aim was to share experiences and models of best practice, as well as identify new strategies and new perspectives, and outline critically engaged responses that create productive dialogue around the future of students, schools and artistic creation in general.