An Eye Does Not Make an I: Expanding the Sensorium

While visual art appeals to the sense of sight, both recent art and popular visual culture appeal to the whole sensorium, the sum total of the ways we experience the world. Common assumptions about the senses regarding their number, their relative importance, and their relation to one another are problematized in light of recent psychological and philosophical understandings. Today, the number of the senses is considered uncertain, perhaps infinite; their importance determined by purpose; and they are understood to work in consort. However, art education remains largely indebted to the legacy of the modernist valorization of vision, and it continues to privilege sight through the visual culture movement. Recent examples of art and popular culture are provided to demonstrate that art education needs to approach the engagement of the senses in a way commensurate with contemporary visual culture.