In this article, the author opines that modernist and especially postmodernist irony has gone beyond its traditional satirical function of deflating falsehood and exposing pretense. Because of certain historical complexities, irony has evolved in such a way that it has become the enemy of genuine open-mindedness. Among some American intellectuals, irony is no longer an instrument of rhetoric or tool of art but rather a dogma that provokes their reverence on almost all occasions. In the face of this all pervasive irony, the author believes that arts educators have one important duty: help students understand the virtue of open mindedness. It is their task to ask why undercutting tradition deserves automatic plaudits--unless, of course, undercutting itself is someone's sacred cow. Using forms ironically, inverting them, shocking bourgeois expectations--there is always a degree of wit in such gestures, but after a while they become predictable. Their task is to help students see the limits in smart-aleck wit. A further challenge is resisting the effect of postmodern irony in lowering standards, extinguishing distinctions between low and high art, defrocking concepts such as "craftsmanship" as the culturally constructed tools of Euromale hegemony, and flatly reducing visual art education to "visual culture studies." (Contains 10 notes.)