The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) celebrated the 20th anniversary of the establishment of its cross-disciplinary art management department on April 3 and 4, 2023.Photo: Courtesy of CAFA

The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) celebrated the 20th anniversary of the establishment of its cross-disciplinary art management department on Monday and Tuesday. To further excavate the potential of the subject in areas such as rural revitalization, cultural relic protection and China's path to modernization, the school held seminars as part of its celebrations.

The two-day event saw experts, artists and professionals in education from countries including Germany, the US, and Italy join seminars to look back at the development of this higher education subject over the past 20 years and discuss its future direction.

CAFA set up the Arts Administration Education Department, the first ever in China, back in 2003. 

"The focus of the arts administration education is art, and it is supported and supplemented by the subjects and professions in the fields of economics, sociology, law and others. The research fields of the subject were altered and tailored based on China's development in art," Yu Ding, head of the school of Art Management and Education and School of Art and Design Management at CAFA, said in his keynote speech looking back the subject's history in China..

Yu emphasized arts administration education's role in developing society. Taking rural revitalization as an example, he pointed out that the loss of traditional villages has been a problem for decades.

"We try to integrate the rural construction into our teaching process. Many local officials and management staff have limited understanding of art, so we cooperate with them and give advice for restoring traditional art and architecture," Yu added.

The importance of international exchanges and mutual learning in this cross-disciplinary field were also stressed during the celebration.

"We do similar things in Bologna as well. We have an arts management program. We're also doing a lot of parity research in an international context. This is particularly interesting when you're doing this kind of stuff, because these tend to be very, very bound to the national or country level, specific laws and traditions and so on," said Lucas Zan, professor at the University of Bologna.

"So comparing from an international point of view is incredibly interesting. It's so rare, by the way, but it's so difficult. When you do the same case study of the same teaching materials in different classes in Italy, in the US, in China and Turkey, we think of them in completely different ways," Zan added.

Global Times