The majority of the essays in the volume originated in a conference Art Studies: between method and fancy held at Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts in April 2005. After officially joining the EU in May 2004, there has been general awareness in Lithuania of there being a lack of larger scale cooperation with European Institutions, art education sector being no exception. As readers will soon discover, what originated as merely a „need to provide Lithuanian artists and art students with more information on and art education in Europe“ resulted in a highly intriguing discussion on the changes and challenges in European art education and the state of art in the present day. Tremendous new opportunities always arise together with new challenges and this collection of essays by sixteen authors from nine countries is proof that increasingly these opportunities and challenges are traversing the confines of one particular country or even region and are shared by much larger international communities than one could ever imagine.