How Soon Is Now? Post-Conditions in Art Education

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.