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)