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Histart 190F

MODERNITY AND GLOBAL CULTURE: THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MASS PRODUCTION (4 units)

This course explores modern art’s anxiety and fascination with the commodity from 1912 to the present.  It asks: what pressures did the rise of mass production in the twentieth-century put on artistic production?   To answer this question, we will study the century’s major economic theories and the visions they offer of the human subject and society.  We will assess how artists used their creative practice to attempt to realize, celebrate, subvert, and escape those visions.  Under what social, economic and political conditions have artists sought to distinguish fine art from mass culture, and under what conditions have artists attempted to integrate the two?  Guided by these questions, we will survey Western modern art from Cubism to Conceptualism, from the canonical to the quirky to tell the story of how artists have and continue to struggle to define the identity and role of the artwork in a society dominated by mass production.

 

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