High school students are expected to make choices about which subjects they study. These choices are not completely open; however, they are steered by what is on offer, previous achievement and conversations with teachers, family and friends; choices are patterned by class, gender, able-ness and race. We offer the perspective of subject choice as resistance. The paper uses student focus group data from a 3-year study of the visual and performing arts in 30 schools in England. We show that students chose the arts not only because what it might do for them in the future, but also for what it provided for them in the everyday. We suggest that the quotidian is an important aspect of choice-making, which, in the case of arts pedagogies, both accommodates the highly regulated norm and offers a counter. This analysis points to avenues for further research on subject choice as well as provides important clues for school reform.