ABSTRACT
The phrase "art censorship" might bring to mind parental advisory labels on gangsta rap albums, the decency clause covering National Education Association funding put into place after the Robert Mapplethorpe controversy, or obscenity laws designed to protect from pornography. Critical pedagogy in general, and critical arts education in particular, have all but disappeared from school curriculums across the United States. A potent recipe of conservative ideological surveillance and wartime national security, mixed with the marketization of the public sector, baked in a glaze of technological mythology, gives rise to an imperial substructure, serving up a main course that is toxic to the advancement of arts education. In the case of arts education, consent is partly manufactured in the institutionalization of the high/low binary. While art is generally seen as symbolic, critical arts education must go beyond simply "ad busting" and address the structural inequalities of the material world.
