The objective of this article is to summarize various approaches to visual culture in art education, both in theory and in practice. As related to theory, I will synthesize an understanding of visual culture in terms of how we approached (came up to) the need for visual culture studies in our transition from modern to postmodern society, as well as how visual culture is approached theoretically in studies. In the shift from modern to postmodern, we see an expansion of notions of “art” to include mass/popular culture; the inclusion of popular culture as a significant site for critical investigation in cultural studies; the increasing pervasiveness of media and its communications; an extension of the term “aesthetics” to include not only the “finer senses” disciplined by the mind but also the uninhibited bodily sensations; and an emphasis on the consumption of goods and the manufacture of desire for these goods, as opposed to the modern ascetic emphasis on the production of goods. All shifts led to the carnivalesque nature of today’s global capitalist society, which lures with aesthetic pleasures while simultaneously relaying ideologies via omnipresent media communications. Visual culture studies are necessitated as a means of giving agency to students as viewers, by teaching them how to see past the mask of aesthetic pleasure, and expose the potentially corrupting underlying ideologies relayed by vehicles of visual culture. This theoretical exploration to how we approached visual culture in art education is followed by examples of approaches to visual culture in practice, in both the undergraduate preservice art education classroom, and a k-12 art room. In these examples, visual culture investigations are utilized as a means for giving agency to the art educator and student artist to empower themselves, as well as viewers of their artwork, to critique consumerism cognitively; and, in doing so, navigate beyond the layers of visual culture artifacts’ appeal to their bodily consumer desires.