Abstract
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 Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly.
It supports and develops further the proposition that the tradition grounded in the concept of a single objective interpretation of a work of art has been significantly undermined by the paradigmatic change that has taken place in the last decades, In the course of this process the vocabulary of signification (e.g. doves, the royal blue, temptations of Christ, class struggle) inherited from the age of ideologies and grand narratives has been significantly weakened