The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna is marking three hundred years since Jacob van Schuppen drafted its statutes in 1726 — modelled on the French academy — with an exhibition that reframes the oldest argument in art education. The Great Michelangelo Is Dead! Avant-Garde and Academicism refuses to treat academicism as a shorthand for the outdated or the avant-garde as the sole owner of the new. Instead it traces the creative friction between the two across fifteen chapters, from the founding of the first academies to present-day debates around identity politics, diversity and geopolitical shifts. Curated by Helmut Draxler, the show starts from a contradiction embedded in Giorgio Vasari's legacy: the writer who exalted the autonomous, original artist was also a cultural official helping to consolidate absolutist rule in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany — a tension that shaped Florence's Accademia del Disegno, founded by Cosimo I in 1563, whose true symbolic founding came a year later at Michelangelo's grandiose funeral. The exhibition follows that tension through the refinement of academic training in the 17th and 18th centuries, the anti-academic revolt against endless plaster-cast copying and proximity to power, and the academy's brief abolition during the French Revolution. One thread follows the master-class reform model envisioned by the Vienna-born Nazarenes and first established in Düsseldorf, tracing its career from the early nineteenth century through the Bauhaus, the Russian Vkhutemas, the upheavals at Düsseldorf in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and into the Bologna Process and today's new academies. The show argues that since the 1960s, contemporary art has treated the copy itself — long devalued by the avant-garde's cult of originality — as an artistic medium, using appropriation and re-enactment as academic practice turned avant-garde method. Historical works from the Academy's own Paintings Gallery, Graphic Collection and Plaster Cast Collection — Botticelli, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Artemisia Gentileschi, Stubbs, Hogarth — are set against contemporary positions including Louise Lawler, Roy Lichtenstein, Katharina Sieverding, Jutta Koether, Vaginal Davis and Heimo Zobernig, with a dedicated 'gallery painting' presentation of Flemish, Dutch and Old German works.