Home Sweet Home? Decorating Magazines as Contexts for Art Education

Abstract

This article explores home decorating magazines as gendered pedagogical sites that are especially concerned with art education. First, it describes the wider economic conditions in which these magazines fulfill functions of promoting longing and consumption related to the home. Then, it considers learner/teacher relations and the kinds of discourses communicated through these documents in which craft and aesthetic instruction are nested and entangled. Finally, it suggests ways that understanding these magazines as pedagogical contexts can help educators use and analyze images and curricula within them. Relying on critical media and feminist analyses, a case is made that home decorating magazines are influential in fostering obdurate, taken-for-granted assumptions related to the nature of art education as a school subject.