Art personalia and the online education. Bulgarian / foreign artists in art education in Bulgaria
Art personalia and the online education. Bulgarian / foreign artists in art education in Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: The study focuses on the specifics of the Internet information flows and resources of Bulgarian and influential foreign artists that are used in the conditions of online learning. The current circumstances of pandemic and social distancing do not create but confirm the situation in which education to a great extent depends on Internet content. The challenges and advantages in such circumstances are discussed and based on my teaching experience and a poll among university students with questions on: ways to obtain information; the most probable sources to which they lead; the share of the specially prepared educational content among the sources; the ratio between the physical and digital resources; the dependence of the students’ choice of digital or physical resources on the time required for the completion of the assignment. There are specific comparisons drawn between online resources on Bulgarian and foreign artists, which lead to the conclusion that the personalia about Bulgarian artists, as online content, contain unreliable information, most often without any authorship, and are usually generated by commercial sites. In places where institutions of memory have a long-standing history and experience, the damage done by the ubiquitous market invasion is not so significant and the chances to find reliable content, supported by authorship, are much higher. So far foreign artists have been taught in our country in a situation of missing museums and a shortage of contemporary publications in public libraries – in this conditions the lockdown does not result in significant losses. Today, the digital images found on the Internet, on the websites of world museums and galleries are growing in number and improving in terms of quality, and many more studies are published in online libraries. Thus, in Bulgaria, the current situation has improved the conditions of studying world-famous art figures and has shown the impossibility to study Bulgarian artists via Internet resources.

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