A Global Art System: An Exploration of Current Literature on Visual Culture, and a Glimpse at the Universal Promethean Principle—with Unintended Oedipal Consequences

ART EDUCATION 11-18: MEANING, PURPOSE AND DIRECTION, edited by Richard Hickman; New York, Continuum; 2nd edition, 2004; 176 pp.

Global Visual Culture within a Global Art System

I have harbored misgivings about the term "visual culture" for several years. Having read Hickman's book with its collection of notable scholars in art and design education, those misgivings turned into qualified acceptance of "visual culture"—so long as it is understood as a global visual culture within a global art system. The ten chapters presented in Hickman's book clearly explore the notion of visual culture in the context of generating an expansive and appropriate canon of art distinctly relevant to our postmodern, multicultural, multidimensional classroom of multiple intelligences.