Visual consumers and art makers: adolescent art-making as a site of legitimate critique of cosmopolitanism

The phenomenon of globalisation presents for adolescent studies a need to navigate the complexities of a transnational commodity society. While globalisation facilitates a freeing up of culture, it can also present as perplexing and contradictory to young, emergent adults. Secondary visual art curricula in Australia, informed by postmodern and popular culture perspectives, are providing sites for the active and powerful negotiation of the phenomena of cosmopolitanism, citizenship and the construction of identity. These sites accomodate personal narrative perspectives that represent legitimate critique for the condition of a mobilised and fragmented self. An examination of five years of Higher School Certificate artworks in New South Wales reveals a rich imagery of how students use their art-making to affirm their consciousness about the world and self. It reveals how visual art-making may facilitate the ongoing mediation of society via mutating images, symbols and meanings in cultures, and provides tangible evidence of how aesthetic engagement can promote an investigation of personal and cultural values through communicative knowing.