chronous, text-based learning environments. Characteristics and mecha-
nisms discussed in this article include disembodied text-based performance
of identities, speech-like writing, space-flexibility and student geographical
location, space-time flexibility, and class attendance/participation, time
flexibility, and asynchronous discussion threads.In the same issue of the journal is an article dealing with the integration
of “digital art” (specifically “internet art”) into the curriculum. A third
article, entitled “Performing Resistance,” is peppered with artworld
buzzwords—a sure sign that the writers are members of the avant-garde,
and that the work under discussion is not art. Declaring, for example,
that “the creative and scholarly works of many contemporaryartists,
critical theorists, and educators challengethe cultural assumptions that
are embedded in our understandings of technology and its relationship
to art and human life,” they further refer to “questionsthat performance
artists and critical theorists raise as they explore the multiple and fluid
intersections between art, technology, and the body” (italics are mine, to
indicate buzzwords).^55 The terms explore and challenge recur repeatedly
throughout the text.
Art Education, the official journal of NAEA, is an illustrated
bimonthly magazine aimed at the classroom teacher. Its editors therefore
exert far more influence than those of Studies. The avant-garde bias of
former editor B. Stephen Carpenter II, now a professor at Penn State
University, may be taken as representative. A practitioner of mixed-
media, assemblage, installation, and performance art, he exhibited work
in the 4th Biennale Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea in Florence
(2003), one of the numerous avant-garde expositions dotting the inter-
national artworld calendar.^56
Representative of many articles published in Art Education is
“Postmodern Principles: In Search of a 21st Century Art Education,” in
which the author, Olivia Gude, identifies eight “important postmodern
artmaking practices” characteristic of the projects in classes she has
taught for teens. One of these, “appropriation,” is the “routine use of
appropriated materials,” such as photographs, in the making of art. For
the students, she reports, “recycling imagery felt comfortable and com-
monplace.” The practice also meant, of course, that they did not have to
learn the traditional skills of drawing and painting. To explain “hybrid-
ity,” another postmodernist principle, Gude writes:
Contemporary artists routinely create sculptural installations utilizing new
media [“media art”] such as large-scale projections of video, sound pieces,The Interminable Monopoly of the Avante-Garde 183