This article argues for art education's potential to transform mundane work, mindful of the steep challenges of the aesthetic and mundane dialectic. Those challenges, magnified in the context of capitalism and industrialism, confronted twentieth-century Indian artist educators Rabindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose, but also confront twenty-first-century art educators. Tagore created Visva-Bharati University to counteract the excessive materialism of modernism, recognising diversity and the immanence of the transcendent in humanity. Tagore's aesthetics, though deeply relational, nevertheless regard the mundane as essentially irredeemable. It is in Visva-Bharati's environment, however, that Nandalal Bose was able to conceive an aesthetic, developed from Yogic ideas of immanence and Far Eastern aesthetics, which envisioned the transformation of the mundane through creative activity.