This article describes the foundations, development and some of the findings from a research project about how the use of the gaze, as a key idea from critical art history, might affect the understanding of art by art educators. It shows how the use of this key idea involved not just the disruption of a modernist model of art interpretation (based on the author and the oeuvre), but also mediated the discursive production of the subjectivity of the interpreters as readerswriters of the work. The research was based in the interpretation of a specific artwork by Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergre.