Engaging Advertisements: Looking for Meaning In and Through Art Education

Abstract

Advertisements penetrate and pervade our visual culture and play a significant and profound role in the symbolic and material milieu of everyday life. Contemporary life can be better understood by critically investigating advertisements as part of a larger social construction of the visual experience. The field of art education has a pressing responsibility to help students develop critical, reflexive, and meaningful approaches to interpreting, critiquing, and producing images, objects, and artifacts from visual culture. This article explores advertisements as cultural sites and commodity narratives that require urgent attention by educators and students. I begin by investigating advertisements as an experience through ideological and affective investments. I then provide classroom examples of students engaging advertisements and other cultural sites informed by issues of representation, production, consumption, and regulation, through a language of critique and possibility. I conclude by arguing that art education should be understood as a critical pedagogy of visual culture.