title: Art's Way Out: Exit Pedagogy and the Cultural Condition (Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education)
author:  John Baldacchino 
description: In taking the critique of inclusion and entry as a first step, <i>Art's Way Out</i>'s discussion of art, politics and learning aims to delineate what an exit pedagogy would look like: where culture is neither seen as a benign form of inclusion nor as a hegemonic veil by which we are all subscribed to the system via popularized forms of artistic and cultural immediacy. An exit pedagogy--as prefigured in what could be called art's way out through the implements of negative recognition qua impasse--would not only avoid the all too facile symmetrical dualism between conservative and progressive, liberal and critical pedagogies, but also seek the continuous referral of such symmetries by setting them aside and look for a way out of the confined edifices of education and culture <i>per se</i>. An exit pedagogy seeks its way out by reasserting representation in the comedic, the jocular, and more effectively in the arts' power of pausing, as that most effective way by which aesthetics comes to effect in its autonomist and radical essence. In this fluent, limpid, and scholarly work, Baldacchino examines, inter alia, the problem of empathy in relation to art as an event (or series of events), drawing upon a wide and rich range of sources to inform what in effect is his manifesto. With a profound understanding of its philosophical basis, Baldacchino unfolds his argument in an internally consistent and elegantly structured way. This is not a book to be 'dipped into', to do so would miss the development of Baldacchino's philosophical position; like an art work itself, <i>Art's Way Out</i> has coherent structure, and a complex, interrelation between form and content, reflecting an artist's concern for getting things right. <br/>--<i>Richard Hickman, Cambridge University</i> <br/>Although art has a limitless capacity to take on myriad responsibilities, according to Baldacchino we also need to consider a 'way out' because only then will we understand how art goes beyond the "boundaries of possibility." As he explains, "our way into reason also comes from an ability to move outside the limits that reasons sets." This is the 'exit pedagogy' that he advocates. And here exit does not mean to leave, but rather to reach beyond, to extend and explore outside the borders we impose on learning, teaching, schooling and most forms of cultural agency. The need to embrace the capacity of art to cycle beyond the contingencies we impose on it also helps to clarify the limits of inclusive arguments for deploying art education for various individual, institutional, and socio-political ends: art as self expression, art as interdisciplinary method, art as culture industry, art as political culture, art as social justice and so on. This image invokes for me part of the legacy of Maxine Greene that Baldacchino revealed in his earlier text, <i>Education Beyond Education</i> (2009), when he explored her thesis of the social imagination, which is best, achieved when teaching becomes 'reaching.' What <i>Art's Way Out</i> gives us is an exit strategy from the deadening tendency to ignore the enduring capacity of art to give life to learning, teaching and the very culture of our being. <br/> <i>--Graeme Sullivan, Penn State University</i>
zlib_text: Knowledge Reigns Supreme 
  
  TRANSGRESSIONS: CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION 
   
  Series Editors 
  Shirley Steinberg, McGill University, Canada 
  Joe Kincheloe, McGill University, Canada 
   
  Editorial Board 
  Heinz-Hermann Kruger, Halle University, Germany  
  Norman Denzin, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, USA  
  Rhonda Hammer, University of California Los Angeles, USA  
  Christine Quail, SUNY, Oneonta 
  Ki Wan Sung, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea 
   
  Scope 
  Cultural studies provides an analytical toolbox for both making sense of educational practice and extending 
  the insights of educational professionals into their labors. In this context Transgressions: Cultural Studies 
  and Education provides a collection of books in the domain that specify this assertion. Crafted for an 
  audience of teachers, teacher educators, scholars and students of cultural studies and others interested in 
  cultural studies and pedagogy, the series documents both the possibilities of and the controversies 
  surr