Mass Culture and the Avant-Garde

Catalog description

This course explores the creative cross-pollination between mass culture and avant-garde art, addressing key concepts in 20th century aesthetics (the middlebrow, the spectacle, pastiche, kitsch) and the evolution of the category of art itself. The mediating conditions of class, race, gender, and sexuality will be central to our examination of these conceptual histories, as will changes in the means of artistic production and distribution. Interdisciplinary and intermedial in its focus, the course will include texts by Theodor Adorno, Amiri Baraka, Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Burger, Guy Debord, Clement Greenberg, Cathy Park Hong, Griselda Pollock, Rosalind Krauss, Dwight MacDonald, Fred Moten, Sianne Ngai, Marjorie Perloff, Susan Sontag, and Hito Steyerl. (ENGL-PST)