home | courses | ha 190f.1


COURSES SPRING 2009

Histart 190F.1

MODERN ART IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE (4 units) Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2-3:30 106 Moffitt, CCN: 05567 Anthony Grudin

Writing to Walter Benjamin in 1936, Theodor Adorno called mass culture and modernist art “torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.” This course will investigate the various forms and global contexts in which mass culture and modernist art have defined, mimicked, and challenged each other during the 20th century. Each week will home in on a particular place and moment: transnational painting and appropriation in the Caribbean in the 1960s; neo-avant-gardes and spectacle in contemporary China; reuse and adornment in contemporary Niger; popular and avant-garde interactions in Mexico in the 1930; art and the everyday in postwar Japan. In each case, students will be expected to grapple with a range of potentially unfamiliar material, and to test their presuppositions about art and culture against a variety of challenging practical and theoretical formulations. Throughout, we will attempt to reexamine both sides of Adorno’s ambivalent pronouncement: the promise of freedom that culture tenders, and the ways in which this promise has been stymied in culture’s divisions.

 

 

home | dept info | faculty | courses| undergraduate program | graduate program | events