The effects of violent media fare upon young people are of great concern for educators and parents alike. Recently, some visual art educators have attempted to deal with the issue under the rubric of visual culture. Adopting a critical position toward media violence, they have developed programs that attempt to encourage in their students a view of citizenship that rejects an easy use of violence as the solution to resolving real life issues. In consideration of these attempts, this article examines media violence--not to comment upon the efforts of other art educators but to point to the exceptionally difficult, perhaps intractable, forces faced by any form of educational intervention. There are many kinds of violent spectacles. This article deals exclusively with violence in current mediated popular forms of entertainment, principally television, film, video, and computer games. It is not narrowly concerned with intentionally aestheticized images, for example, through the use of slow motion or when the soundtrack to images of mass slaughter switches from the mayhem on screen to the souring beauties of operatic singing. Such images are included here, but the article deals with an inclusive range of representations of violence typically found in some degree to be pleasurable by large sections of the public. Specifically, four kinds of violence are examined: comic, transgressive, retaliatory, and gratuitous. (Contains 111 notes.)