Topics in 19th-Century Art

Catalog description

Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2022 semester, the topic will be: World's Fairs. This seminar will study the manifold novelties first displayed at the nineteenth and early-twentieth century World's Fairs, stretching from 1851 to 1915. Such events-first held in cities like London and Paris, but eventually all over the world-chronicled the period's innovations in art, technology, ethnography, and science. Many of the most crucial inventions were first shown to the public at World's Fairs: electricity, the telephone, and the bicycle, among other innovative artistic techniques and everyday objects. The fairs brought a community of millions of tourists from all over the world together, thereby encoding complex structures of empire and international relations within a pretense to entertainment. The "global" ambitions of universal expositions, and the image of the "world" they helped construct, will come under close scrutiny for its frequent imperial overreach, not least in the controversial practice of human displays. We will also test the thesis that the universal expositions engendered new ways of seeing and engaging with the material world. Finally, we will study the period definitions of "innovation" in industrial production promoted by such large-scale events.