4.602 | Spring 2012 | Undergraduate

Modern Art and Mass Culture

Lecture Notes

LEC # LECTURE TOPICS
Week 1 – MODERNITY, MODERNISM, MODERNIZATION
1 Introduction to Theories of Modernism and Modernity (PDF)
Week 2 – MASS CULTURE AND REVOLUTION
2 Introduction to Theories of Mass Culture (PDF)
3 Eugène Delacroix, or How to Imagine Liberty (PDF)
Week 3 – FIELD TRIP

Field trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see Monet’s La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume), 1876, and other paintings.

Week 4 – POST-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE
4 Caricature and the Safehouse of “High Art” (PDF)
5 Courbet, Realism, and Popular Images / ASCO preview (PDF)
Week 5 – MANET’S REALISM AND THE PAINTING OF MODERN LIFE
6 Manet: Flâneurs and Flâneuses in the Modernizing City / ASCO (PDF)
7 European Orientalism: Camille’s Kimono and Gauguin’s Skirt (PDF)
Week 6 – IMPRESSIONISM & PHOTOGRAPHY
8 The Impressionist Eye as Camera (PDF)
Week 7 – SERIALISM & SEMIOSIS
9 Serial Impressions (Print and Eye) (PDF)
10 Picasso’s Cubism: Politics and/or Semiosis (PDF)
Week 8 – NEW SUBJECTS FOR MODERNITY
11 The Soviet Avant-Garde (PDF)
12 Futurism’s and Dadaism’s Popular Mechanics (PDF)
Week 9 – PRODUCTION AND (COMMODITY) FETISH
13 In and Around Duchamp (PDF)
14 Irrational / Rational Production: Surrealism vs. The Bauhaus Idea (PDF)

Additional handout: Bauhaus (PDF)

Week 10 – POSTWAR PRIMITIVES
15 Anti-culture? Dubuffet, Pollock, and Premonitions of the Postmodern (PDF)
Week 11 – MARKETING MASS CULTURE
16 Robert Rauschenberg’s Coca-Cola Plan / International Pop (PDF)
17 The “Business Art Business,” Globalism vs. Globalization (PDF)
Week 12 – SIMULATION, SPECTACLE, & THE POSTMODERN
18 Postmodernism, Spectacle, and Institutional Critique (PDF)
19 Postmodernism and Feminism (PDF)

Additional handout: Mapping Postmodernism (PDF)

Week 13 – NEW MEDIA & BIENNIAL CULTURE
20 New Media / Mass Media / Sensory Reconfigurations (PDF)
21 Biennial Culture and the Aesthetics of Experience (PDF)
Week 14 – PRESENT STRATEGIES
22 Present-day Strategies Vis-à-vis Art and Mass Culture (PDF)

Guest lecturers: Star TAs, Rebecca Uchill and Nick Vicario!

23 Last class: concluding discussion of class themes, review for exam, and discussion of student research paper abstracts (PDF)

Course Info

Departments
As Taught In
Spring 2012
Learning Resource Types
Lecture Notes
Written Assignments