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Course Description

Summary

This course is a reading seminar of important texts on art and culture by critics, theorists and artists from late modernism through postmodernism to the present moment. It will include close readings and discussions of essays from 1960 to 2013 to consider the changing conditions under which art is conceived, produced, distributed and experienced. A departure point for the course is Michael Frieds seminal essay Art and Objecthood (1967), which critiqued the solicitation of the spectator in Minimalist art and subsequently generated a discourse on the fate of the autonomous position of art. That discourse continues to resonate today, and with this in mind the course gives particular attention to the increasingly integrated role of the spectator in contemporary artistic practices.