Art Theory and Methods

Catalog description

The course will cover key developments in the evolution of art historiography, aesthetic theory and methods. Students will be engaged in discussions related to the practice of art history from an historiographical perspective and will conduct verbal and written analyses in connection with primary and secondary sources derived from canonical scholarship. The course will include discussion of theoretical and methodological texts from antiquity and the Middle Ages, to the early Modern period, the Enlightenment, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to postmodernity and the contemporary era. These analyses will consider notions of aesthetics, historiography, deconstruction, authorship, various modes of identity formation, and globalization. Students will become proficient in a wide range of aesthetic, historiographical, theoretical, and methodological practices related to fine arts disciplines.