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This article investigates the concept of change for art education in times when the waning relevancy of postmodernity has brought about a set of competing post-conditions that point to an entanglement between continuity and discontinuity and to where the Now belongs to a future that is "not," prima facie, New. This temporal arrangement--the Now without the New--poses a challenge to art education's historicity of its present practices as well as the ontology of educational thought. The first part of the article explores the temporal conditions for the conceptualization of the Now and the New. Then, visual culture art education is investigated as the latest New thing in North American art education literature that has a particular focus on the Now with an inherent promise for the New. Last, post-Internet art is discussed as a possible example of a Now without a perpetual recourse to the New.

This article focuses on the use of "paradigm" as a historiographical concept in art education research from the 1980s onward and examines what kind of understanding of time and history it has promoted. While Thomas Kuhn's paradigm theory has lost its relevance for the current historical research in art education, art educators still continue to use terms "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" when proposing new approaches to teaching art or alternatively articulating the difference between past and present practices. Kuhnian paradigm theory and the post-Kuhnian "postparadigmatic" era have helped to approach the historical contingency of art education's epistemologies, but have not challenged the linear and chronological time of scientific knowledge production. By using the term "paradigm" to examine the temporal modalities of art education research, this article seeks to question more generally what kind of understanding of time and history art education researchers put forward.

In "Postphysical Vision: Art Education's Challenge in an Age of Globalized Aesthetics (AMondofesto)" (2008) and "Beyond Aesthetics: Returning Force and Truth to Art and Its Education" (2009), jan jagodzinski argued for politics that go "beyond" representation--a project that radically questions visual culture pedagogies that emphasize the dynamics of representation as the key for social change. Despite jagodzinski's willingness to dispute theoretical positions that are easily taken for granted, he has sustained a very specific understanding of visual culture in his theorization that neglects various forms of digital media. In this commentary, the author critically examines the focus of his critique and expands it outside the realm of fine art and cinema by introducing new arenas of scrutiny, where art educators may tackle problems of "designer capitalism."

The purpose of this article is to explore the claim that seeing art education as a human right reduces learning into a linear process of development and assigns art education a constricted place between a universal rule and its implementation. This makes the education of art easily integrated in any dominant constellation of power (e.g., the global expansion of American industry). Rather than challenging this logic, art tends to naturalize it: as an essential component of life, it is art that fully develops human individuals. Artistic practices open up a possibility for art educators to experiment with their contingency and loosen the contractual relationship between what they do and what are expected to do. Art curriculum offers a valuable time and space to examine the ethics of human and nonhuman life.

In the article, the author discusses creative destruction and its application in education. Other topics include the integration of art, education, and economics in art education in the U.S., the views of former U.S. education official William Torrey Harris on the societal mission of art education, and how ancient Greece was a model of societal order and harmony in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

There is a historical tendency in art education to envision both art and education as integral parts of the development and sustainment of individual human life and a just society. While this conception has enabled art educators to tackle various societal issues in their profession, it reduces the societal presence of art education into a predetermined narrative of completion and conservative politics where everything eventually finds its allegedly right place and function. In this article, I historicize this argument by examining how human life and its development have been tied to the goals of public art education in the United States in the early decades of the 20th century and reflect on what kind of tradition of political thought have they upheld. In order to eventually offer an alternative approach to politics of art education, I end this article by sketching an impossible relation between art, education, and human life that would not consider human agency and its development as given categories but as modalities of being that have radical potentialities beyond predetermined actualizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]