Prague, 18 June 2024 – We feel it incumbent upon us to respond to the petition entitled “Statement and appeal on the part of artists and the cultured public regarding the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU), the Jindřich Chalupecký Award (CJCH) and the National Gallery Prague (NG).” This is no simple task, since the petition is an incoherent mélange of material points, personal attacks and disinformation. Moreover, it targets three different types of organisation with different content and operating principles. At the same time, we hold many of the signatories to this petition in sincere respect and value their artistic contributions and human qualities. We cannot therefore ignore their voices.

AVU should be a place where personalities of different generations, identities, origins and focus come together. The mastery of past eras is one of the indispensible pillars on which the art of the present day stands. At the same time, it must be emphasised that the task of an art school is also to open up new horizons for students, to reflect upon contemporary reality and observe the world around us. And so we will not devote extensive space to explaining why not only older men and their students teach at AVU, but a far wider range of personalities – we take this as read. It gives us great pleasure that AVU is home to artists of the most contemporary artistic orientations who are naturally at the start of their careers. The quality of the teaching staff at AVU is demonstrated by the participation of its members at exhibitions at prestigious institutions such as Tate Modern, Bozar, mumok, Martin Gropius Bau, Taipei Arts Museum, Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 14th Shanghai Biennale, the Venice Biennale and Schirn Kunsthalle. Over the last five years, the number of foreign teachers and students at our school has also increased significantly.

The study programmes at AVU are not the work of a single individual. They are developed in accordance with the Higher Education Act, regulations registered with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, and internal processes such as approval and discussion by the Arts Council, the Academic Senate and the Academy’s Board of Trustees. Selection procedures for academic positions are conducted openly and transparently all the way from the initial call for applications to the final choice. The general public can attend presentations by individual candidates (something that is not the case at other art schools). A panel of experts then submits its recommended candidates in order. Under the law, the rector may or may not respect the recommendation. In the case referred to in the petition, the rector respected the commission’s decision.

The new programmes reinforce the perspective of the autonomy of students, who enjoy greater freedom when choosing their study path. Some studios at AVU are run by individuals, others by collectives, and this corresponds to the different needs of students. We leave it to students to decide whether they feel “restricted in their freedom of artistic expression and freedom of speech” and whether “their uniqueness and creativity is being destroyed”: their statements certainly suggest otherwise.

AVU students belong to a generation whose world view, interests and priorities are far from identical with those of people in their fifties and sixties. The clash of old and new is a natural, periodically recurring phenomenon in the art world. The only element specific to the current situation is that it is the older rebelling against the young – it tends usually to be the other way around. This does nothing to change the fact that AVU at present is fully committed to the transmission of craft skills in parallel with engagement in contemporary technological (digitalisation, AI), cultural and social discourses. Their inclusion in the curriculum is not a departure from the school’s mission, but a logical and relevant extension of it.

Despite the confrontational tone of the petition, we are open to a meaningful discussion regarding the direction AVU should take in the future. We respect a diversity of viewpoints and believe that, apart from a few signatories driven by purely personal grievances, the rest have only the welfare of the school at heart. However, what we will emphatically not respect are outright lies and slander, in this case involving the exploitation of the death of two young people in order to generate misinformation regarding “drugs at AVU”. This tragic event was in no way related to AVU activities. The lie contained in the petition is already the subject of a pre-litigation challenge and we will defend against it with all the legal means at our disposal. The signatories should know that by affixing their names to the petition they are complicit in spreading this morally contemptible disinformation.

Jana Bernartová, Vít Havránek, Anetta Mona Chisa, Šárka Krtková, Vice-Rectors at AVU

Response of the AVU vice-rectors to the petition attacking the management of the Academy