In arts education, Visual Culture Studies (VCS) is currently at its height, and proponents of it act with all the verve of partisans on a roll. A little knowledge of history, however, should curb their enthusiasm. Academia has a way of assimilating the most extreme theories and pursuits into standard operating procedure, and the evanescence of reader response theory, deconstruction, and other schools is an important lesson. Ten years from now, practitioners will look back upon VCS as they look back upon New Historicism: as an interesting practice with lasting influence on some literary scholars, but hardly the sweeping transformation that had been predicted by theorists in the late 1980s. Whether and how VCS endures remains to be seen. Its legacy will depend, however, not on its timeliness, its reflection of larger social and cultural trends, or its usefulness to graduate students and younger scholars and teachers. Those elements will fade as time passes. What will make it last are what make any humanistic inquiry last: the cogency of its ideas, the infectiousness of its social vision, and the reliability of its judgment and taste.