ABSTRACT
The Art in the Mainstream (A.I.M) statement represents an official position of a concerned art educator. The statement is as clear and concise as the rhetoric of the words "clear" and "concise" indicate. The rhetoric that it should be free of the jargon that so often afflicts pronouncements of this sort is impossible. Unfortunately, everything about the A.I.M. statement is controversial. All art is ideological which is not to say that interpreting it automatically brings one into a state of false consciousness; rather it becomes important to recognize how discursive formations—movements and styles in art—embody a way of being. Such embodiment has political and ethical ramifications that must be warranted. Kantian aesthetic baggage included a sense of beauty which was already well established by the High Gothic in its appreciation of Nature. Immanuel Kant accepted the organon of representation and compared it to the beauty of Nature.
