I have known Ralph Smith since the late sixties, when I went to the Univer-sity of Illinois as a graduate student and he arrived as an Assistant Professor. He has been a good friend since that time, generous, supportive, and interesting to talk with. So it is a pleasure to write about him. He has been a major influence in thinking about art education in North America for all these years and has consistently articulated a point of view of central importance in our field. And I have always found that discussion with him means wrestling with important issues.

This essay is about one of the issues I have wrestled with in conversation with Ralph, sometimes in person but more often in my own mind. It has to do with only one of the many contributions he has made to art education but it is one that is foundational to his thought and to the thought of many others. The issue is the value of the idea of the" aesthetic," as in the" aesthetic experience" of persons and the" aesthetic qualities" of objects. The idea provides us a way of talking about artworks and our response to them that defines and justifies some goals for art education and influences our thinking about curriculum. The interest of the topic is that there has recently arisen a tendency in art education to abandon talk about the aesthetic in favor of talk about meaning, as in the" meanings" of artworks. I want to weigh these alternatives. This is because I have not found my-self able to join decisively with either side of what often appears to be more like a conflict than a discussion in the field of art education. I want to portray the change as an evolution rather than a revolution, and to find areas of agreement as well as disagreement around the difficult issues of cognition and our response to artworks. And I want to ask whether the differences between these two ways of talking, which of course are embedded in theo-ries about art, are responsible for differences about more practical matters, such as the school art curriculum.