After the Avant-Gardes

difficulty of defining ‘art.’” While it is true that the concept of art is dif-

ficult for ordinary people to define, most do not even try. They have an

intuitive sense of what art is, which prompts them to ask such questions

as “Why is that art?” or “That’s art?” What those questions imply is the

sense that something regarded as art by experts may not be, or is not, art.

At the end of an earlier edition of her book, Adams left the reader

with this parting thought:

Having entered the twenty-first century, we are presented with a prolifera-

tion of artistic styles and expanding definitions of what constitutes art. The

pace of technological change... spawns new concepts and styles at an

increasing rate.... It will be for future generations to look back at our era

and to separate the permanent from the impermanent.^51

To grasp just how entrenched the avant-garde is in schools across

America, one need only consider the makeup of the National Art

Education Association (NAEA), which was founded in 1947. Its more

than 22,000 members (many of whom refer to themselves as “art edu-

cators”) teach at every level of instruction from kindergarten through

twelfth grade.^52 While the vast majority are no doubt well-meaning and

hard-working, albeit often ill-trained, a vocal minority are activists who

proselytize their students regarding social and political issues involving

race, gender, sexual orientation, the environment, and the war on terror-

ism, at the expense of art.

The most influential members of NAEA, however, are the professors

who teach future art teachers. They are the ones who occupy most of the

key leadership positions in the organization, and who edit its two peri-

odicals.

Studies in Art Education, the more scholarly of the two NAEA jour-

nals, features such articles as “Students Online as Cultured Subjects:

Prolegomena to Researching Multicultural Arts Courses on the Web.”^53

Scholarly jargon (as in the title) and flawed syntax render it virtually

unintelligible—not only to ordinary art teachers but probably to many

academic readers as well. (As one retired professor of art and education

has observed, “trying to make sense of written and oral presentations in

our profession is like swimming in a sea of molasses.”)^54 Consider, for

example, this excerpt from the article’s abstract:

[R]esearchers need to recognize mechanisms by which students can be con-

stituted as cultured (gendered, racialized, etc.) subjects, and that many of

these mechanisms will depend on certain characteristics particular to asyn-

182 Louis Torres