When "A Genomic Portrait--Sir John Sulston" by Mark Quinn appeared in the London National Portrait Gallery's exhibition in 2001/2, the ensuing public controversy over its portrayal raised a number of questions about the representation of a publicly known figure. Because the portrait was the Gallery's first contemporary commission using…

Contemporary art requires that art and cultural educators reposition encounters with artefacts, images and performances into a context for new discourses. Whereas digital media and other aspects of visual popular culture predominate the frames of reference of school-age children, their context (codes) of reference, in large part, do not contain…

This paper examines the onto-epistemic status and understanding of contemporary material culture and of visual art, particularly in the context of gallery education. It does so through a case study of the response of 15 year-old school students in the Czech Republic and in England to a recent photographic exhibition, I.N.R.I., created by artists…