People speculate with the fantastic. Fantasy is a celebrity and money-making machine. As a module in people's brains, it has the capacity to transform plain junk into gold that glitters. Fantasy mobilizes and instrumentalizes the fantastic to form and celebrate spectacles that exist and have always existed--illusions of social relations of…

While rejecting modernist philosophical aesthetics, the author argues for the use in art education of a current, ordinary-language definition of aesthetics as visual appearance and effect, and its widespread use in many diverse cultural sites is demonstrated. Employing such a site-specific use of aesthetics enables art education to more clearly…

In this article, the author discusses Richard Shusterman's defense of popular culture and intends to show that the entertainment industry has a dark side which Shusterman tends to ignore. Richard Shusterman is a pragmatist aesthetician who promotes art as an integral part of the ever-changing stream of life, believing that popular culture provides…

The author contends that by reclaiming their own valuable connection to reflective artistic experience and reception, aesthetic theory and art education can contribute to a reconceptualization of autonomy and critique and, perhaps more importantly, to a reorientation of educational practice. Adorno's aesthetics is exceptionally relevant to this…

Hauntology refers to spectral traces, phantom voices, and palimpsestic discourses that help construct a way of understanding ourselves and acting in the world. This essay explores the hauntological shifts within art education's struggle over popular (visual) culture through a review of positions that view popular culture as an embodiment of…

In this paper, the author describes popular visual culture as seductive, engaging the interest of children and adults because it is both complex and highly sophisticated in aesthetic terms. The author states his agreement with the proponents of a visual culture approach designed to broaden the content of art teaching beyond fine arts to include…

The homeboy aesthetic is identifiable as an assemblage of key signifiers: clothing (baggy pants and undershirts are perhaps the most significant), hair (or, in the current moment of the aesthetic, lack of hair), bold stance, and distinct language (think "calo" mixed with hip-hop parlance), all combining to form a distinguishable cultural…

The winning of an artist representing the lowest level of Finnish musical taste during the 2006 Eurovision song contest marks not only the rebellious attitude towards the over-sanitized contest, but it was the result of a new practice--voting by text message. Recently, music-biased schools that were once selective of the music they teach are now…

Throughout history, certain members of nearly all cultures have deliberately altered their body's natural appearance. Today, people live in a time when medicine can cure the body and also reshape it. Hence, many people use biomedical means, such as steroids and hormones to alter their bodies. Additionally, cosmetic surgery is becoming increasingly…

Since the early nineties, David Novitz and the author have been engaged in an ongoing debate about mass art. The latest installment in that exchange is Novitz's article "The Difficulty with Difficulty" which represents a sustained attack on the conception of mass art advanced in the author's book "A Philosophy of Mass Art." In this article, the…