This article addresses shifts in the pedagogical positioning of art theory and art practice through the decades of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and considers how shifts to postdisciplinarity might inform practices in the art academy today. It considers legacies of modernity to disclose methodological and ideological scaffolds upon which studio art and its study have been built in the Western academy. It works through the philosophical projects of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida as a way of bringing questions to the privileging of metaphysics as a foundation of academic knowledge in and of art, drawing attention to one art academy in New Zealand as a mini case study--but the implications from this example are not limited to one institution in one location. Asserting that there is a continuing need for political scrutiny of knowledge and its formations in and through the study of art, the discussion ultimately makes a call for the activation of the politics of difference in theory and practice as a way of critically engaging and intervening in the epistemological foundations and cultural conditions of art and knowledge in a globalized world. (Contains 27 notes.)