Postmodernism and After: Contemporary Aesthetics

Catalog description

This course explores the history of contemporary art and visual culture from postmodernism to the present. We will focus on major artistic movements such as Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance Art, and Relational Aesthetics. Along with and inseparable from aesthetics and media, we will chart the ways in which class, gender, race, and sexual inequality have figured into the major aesthetic movements of our time. By reading theory and criticism, discussing artworks across media forms, and researching artistic movements in context, students will examine art since the 1960s and its connections to cultural history. Graduate students will complete a research project and class presentation in addition to the writing assignments and discussion expected in the undergraduate section.