Art Interpretation as Subject Constitution Research on the Role of Critical Art History in Teacher Education

This article describes the foundations, development and some of the findings from a research project about how the use of ‘the gaze’, as a key idea from critical art history, might affect the understanding of art by art educators. It shows how the use of this key idea involved not just the disruption of a modernist model of art interpretation (based on the author and the oeuvre), but also mediated the discursive production of the subjectivity of the interpreters as readers/writers of the work. The research was based in the interpretation of a specific artwork by Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.