In a recent presentation to one of my classes in art theory, a visiting artist referred to her work as "conceptual" rather than medium based in a discipline-specific way to help explain her movement from photography, to installation, and now to multimedia computing as her current artistic focus. In my own introductory studio classes, I have occasionally urged students to be more conceptual in their approach to design. When I say this, I am urging them to work out ideas more fully in advance of their final designs and to engage more deeply in research. Were we using the term 'conceptual' in the same way? Since the emergence of conceptual art as a movement in the 1960s, educators and artists have emphasized the role of the "conceptual" in art education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. This emphasis on the "idea" as the most important element in artistic development in some cases replaces or deemphasizes formal, representational, and expression-based aspects of art education, especially at advanced levels of artistic training.1 Does this heightened importance of "the concept" reflect a fundamentally new philosophical conceptualization of art and art education, or, more narrowly, does it reflect the historical influence of an art movement and a generation of art educators who came of age in the late sixties and seventies?