The Secret Lives of Things: Design and Decorative Arts since the 18th Century

Catalog description

This course will study the meanings of ordinary and extraordinary objects of daily life. Ranging from pre-Revolutionary France to the global present, we will look at furniture, interiors, graphics, appliances, ceramics, and other ornamental and useful goods in Europe and America within their aesthetic, historical, economic, social and political contexts. Among other issues, the course will consider the effects of technological change such as changing conditions of labor; industrialization and new means of production and distribution of objects; the advent of synthetic materials; and effects of production and consumption on the environment. We will discuss the relationship of objects to gender-how gender roles are encoded in, defined and redefined by objects-and patterns of domestic life. Another theme of the course will be habits of consumption, where goods are bought and sold, how meaning is attached to consumption and purchases become linked to the presentation of a social self. The course addresses the General Education objectives of Effective Communication, Key Literacies and Global Learning, and will fulfil the objectives of a GA course by demonstrating the essential methodologies of art history and visual culture, including formal analysis, formal comparison, cross-cultural comparison how historical evidence, especially primary source accounts of objects, enable us to understand a work in its original context. In familiarizing students with examples of styles, makers, and types of object, the course teaches students how works of visual and material culture embody and express cultural values and social categories and expand students' knowledge and comprehension of the role that the arts play in various aspects of human endeavor.