This paper considers the artistic and literary movement called "Postmodernism." Noting that postmodernism is intellectually grounded in the premise that its discourse must expose positions of privilege and power relations in society, the paper asks of art education, How much has the postmodern condition, a thesis of cultural relativism that denies that we can step outside of custom to judge custom, affected our domain? The paper first discusses the early 20th-century movement called "Dada" as a precursor to the postmodern condition. It explores Marcel Duchamp's "art making," when he abandoned painting and began to work with industrial or commercially produced materials that suited the expression of his ideas and his iconoclasm. Duchamp attempted to escape the realm of aesthetics, but in doing so he created a new aesthetic field. The paper then discusses the ideas of several postmodern theorists, including Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Arthur Danto, Fredric Jameson, and Robert Dixon. It contends that the notion of postmodernism as it applies to visual arts needs to be clearly defined and that the greatest danger art education faces is the inability of many educators to unravel the complexities of postmodern discourse and put into perspective its role in artistic discourse. (Contains 20 references.) (BT)