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)