111-243/343 Postmodern Prospects: Issues in Contemporary Art and Criticism

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This subject assumes that the postmodern is not a singular entity, readily defined, but a disparate body of strategic responses to shifting cultural and historical circumstances. The course will focus on a series of case studies intended to review various versions of postmodernism. The subject will consider practices in the visual arts (painting, installation, photography), mass culture (fashion, graphic design), and cultural institutions (art criticism, the art market, the museum). The subject will consider: history (its relationship to national culture, its narrative function, pastiches of it in recent art); identity (its fragmentation along lines of gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, age etc.); authorship and originality (their fate in the age of mass media); regionalism (the development of local discourse against globalism); quality (the politics of taste and evaluation); temporality (the 'useful life' of contemporary art); and intermedia practices (the end of specialisation and categorical division in contemporary culture). In keeping with the exploratory nature of the subject, methodologies derived from art history, social theory, cultural studies and literary criticism will be investigated.

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