[and] digital photography. Indeed, multi-media works of art are now
encountered in contemporary museums and galleries more frequently than
traditional sculpted or painted objects.^57Gude, Co-ordinator of Art Education in the School of Art and Design at
the University of Illinois at Chicago, holds that art education plays a
vital role in developing “democratic life,” a role that is properly the
purview of civics and history classes.^58
One of the most ominous signs of postmodernist influence in today’s
art classrooms is the “visual culture” movement of recent years.
Advocated by many prominent academics in the field, it focuses not on
works of art, but on anything seen with the naked eye, particularly if it
can be viewed in relation to race or sexual orientation or other hot-but-
ton social and political issues of the day. As Kamhi observed in an arti-
cle entitled “Where’s the Artin Today’s Art Education?,” a “key factor in
the shift to visual culture studies has undoubtedly been postmod-
ernism—which has all too swiftly gained wide currency.” In that same
article, she cited a rare NAEA dissenter, John Stinespring, who argued
that postmodernism is governed by a series of major fallacies, which
teachers have uncritically accepted—among them (as summarized by
Kamhi): “an ever-broadening definition of art—the acceptance as of
equal value anything put forward as art; the rejection of all standards of
qualitative judgment; the denigration of individual creativity and origi-
nality; an emphasis on ‘multiculturalism’ at the expense of the person-
ally meaningful; [and] the insistence that all art makes implicit or
explicit statements about socioeconomic or political issues—with the
implication that there is only one “right” position on each issue, invari-
ably to the left of center.”^59Conclusion
Admittedly, I have sketched a rather pessimistic picture regarding the
future of art. Having argued that the avant-garde enjoys a virtual monop-
oly, I have suggested that it is unlikely to end soon. What is needed to
reverse the present state of affairs was anticipated by the philosopher Eliseo
Vivas more than half a century ago. In an essay entitled “The Objective
Basis of Criticism,” he charged that with regard to the arts, “contemporary
American criticism suffers from a serious defect: it ignores, sometimes
truculently, the need for a systematic philosophy of art.” His interest in such
matters, he noted, “originally sprang from certain convictions which thirty-
five years of study have confirmed and clarified”:184 Louis Torres