The Art Teacher

"The Art Teacher" has received a generally positive reception, and appears on other releases in Wainwright's discography, including Live at the Fillmore, a concert film accompanying Want Two.

[3]The music in the song has been compared to Philip Glass's work, with Wainwright's "round vocals [leaping] from deep lows to piqued highs".

"[5] Pitchfork's Stephen Deusner described "The Art Teacher" as "a woman remembering her first love, the instructor of the title who turned her on to Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner", with the story told "over a Philip Glass prism of piano chords, a plaintive horn, and a slightly sped-up tempo".

[12] In addition to Turner, the song's lyrics reference the painters Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, and John Singer Sargent as the teacher escorts his students through the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[2] The track was recorded live at Le Metropolis in Montreal by Guillaume Bengle and Rod Shearer; Marius de Vries is credited as the producer.

[2] The Want Two version also appears on Vibrate: The Best of Rufus Wainwright,[17][18] a greatest hits album released in February 2014 by Universal Music Enterprises in Australia and Ireland, and in other nations subsequently.

"[9] In The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (2016), Katherine Williams said the pronoun shifts within the song's lyrics allow Wainwright "play between genders", and noted that the singer usually sings in the first person.

[28] In 2008, Brandon Summers of The Helio Sequence said the song introduced him to Wainwright's music, and that he now considers the singer-songwriter an artist he most admires.

[29] "The Art Teacher" appears on the soundtrack to Peter Hinton's 2013 stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892).