Modern Art and Mass Culture

Calendar

LEC #	LECTURE TOPICS	KEY DATES
Week 1–Modernity, Modernism, Modernization
1	Introduction to Theories of Modernism and Modernity
Week 2–Mass Culture and Revolution
2	Introduction to Theories of Mass Culture
3	Eugène Delacroix, or How to Imagine Liberty
Recitation Discuss readings and view a selection from the BBC program “Ways Of Seeing”. View the program “Pictures Beneath the Cobblestones: July 28, 1830, Liberty Leading the People”. Review the Marxist contribution to theories of mass culture.
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”
5	Courbet, Realism, and Popular Images / ASCO preview	Paper 1 due
Recitation Discuss readings. Go over writing strategies for first paper on Delacroix.
Field trip to Williams Art Museum
Week 5–Manet’s Realism and the Painting of Modern Life
6	Manet: Flâneurs and Flâneuses in the Modernizing City / ASCO
7	European Orientalism: Camille’s Kimono and Gauguin’s Skirt
Recitation Midterm reviews. Discussion of Orientalism. Gender and the city.
Week 6–Impressionism & Photography
Midterm exam (includes take-home essay, paper 2, due at exam)
8	The Impressionist Eye as Camera
Week 7–Serialism & Semiosis
9	Serial Impressions (Print and Eye)
10	Picasso’s Cubism: Politics and/or Semiosis
Recitation Review theories of modernism emerging in Paris in regard to new reproductive technologies (the camera, the lithograph). Go over the midterm. Review how to do close readings in preparation for paper 3.
Week 8–New Subjects for Modernity
11	The Soviet Avant-Garde
12	Futurism’s and Dadaism’s Popular Mechanics	Paper 3 due
Recitation Discussion of semiotics, gender, sexuality / avant-garde, and kitsch. Approaching paper 3–how to do close readings.
Week 9–Production and (Commodity) Fetish
13	In and Around Duchamp
14	Irrational / Rational Production: Surrealism vs. The Bauhaus Idea
Recitation Discussion of fetishism / commodity with respect to art, production, and kitsch. Peer review and the process of revision.
Week 10–Postwar Primitives
15	Anti-culture? Dubuffet, Pollock, and Premonitions of the Postmodern
Recitation Discussion of the anti-art impulse and the beginnings of postmodernism. Continuing discussion of editing and revision of re-written paper 4. Brainstorming session on possible modern / postmodern paper topics. Discussion of strategies for visual recall and note-taking for the final exam.
Week 11–Marketing Mass Culture
16	Robert Rauschenberg’s Coca-Cola Plan / International Pop	Paper 4 (revision) due
17	The “Business Art Business,” Globalism vs. Globalization	Outline and proposed bibliography for Paper 5 due
Recitation Continuing discussion of modernism and postmodernism. Review readings and polemics on internationalism, globalization, and globalism.
Week 12–Simulation, Spectacle, & the Postmodern
18	Postmodernism, Spectacle, and Institutional Critique
19	Postmodernism and Feminism	Complete all oral presentations by the end of this week.
Recitation View Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”. Discuss readings. Abstract writing.
Week 13–New Media & Biennial Culture
20	New Media / Mass Media / Sensory Reconfigurations
21	Biennial Culture and the Aesthetics of Experience	Abstract of paper 5 due
Recitation Discuss readings. Review progress on final research papers and abstracts.
Week 14–Present Strategies
22	Present-day Strategies Vis-a-vis Art and Mass Culture Guest lecturers: Star TAs, Rebecca Uchill and Niko Vicario!
23	Last class: concluding discussion of class themes, review for exam, and discussion of student research paper abstracts.	Paper 5 due or exam date tba