The creation, exhibition and collection of art present a veritable minefield of ethical quagmires. Debates around such topics as beauty, originality, provenance, obscenity and identity raise crucial questions about what art is, how it works, and why it matters across both private and public spheres. Organized into four parts, this course takes scandal itself as a starting point for better understanding the politics of art as a privileged cultural category.

The first part of the course, "The Nature of Art," foregrounds cultural constructions of beauty, "originality" and truth, the politics of forgeries and fakes, copies, and the ethics of artistic transgression. The second part of the course, "Big Money," foregrounds the history of speculation in the private market, the ethics of philanthropy, and competing constructions of cultural value. The third part of the course, "Property," foregrounds the thorny politics of cultural property. The fourth and final part of the course, "Culture Wars," centers on debates around censorship and obscenity, cultural appropriation and museum protests.

The white cube is the paradigmatic modern and contemporary exhibition space. As canonically described by the artist and critic Brian O’Doherty, the white cube is a space that is “unshadowed, white, clean, artificial.” Like a sacred space, to which it bears an explicit resemblance, it confers an eternal, spiritual value on the artworks displayed within it. There is nothing neutral, however, about the minimalist galleries in which modern and contemporary art is shown. These spaces do not simply contain art. They produce it.

How do spaces of display inform the production and reception of art? In this course, we will grapple with this question as pertains specifically to art from the 20th and 21st Centuries. In the first half of the course, we will look at the history of the white cube as both an architectural and art historical construct. In the second half of the course, we will turn our attention to the mutual inextricability of contemporary art and the spaces of its display, looking at such art movements as minimalism, conceptual art, land art, light and space art, institutional critique, and video art. Throughout, we will draw on a diverse range of theoretical frameworks (from fields of media studies, science and technology studies (STS), sociology, and critical theory) to expand traditional art historical ways of thinking about the politics of space and display.

The canon of modern art reads as a litany of famous men: Édouard Manet, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Nam June Paik and so on. In this course, we will survey the history of modern and contemporary art through the work of female artists. Starting with Impressionism and working our way forwards to the present day, we will chart a chronology of art in which artists like Berthe Morisot, Natalia Goncharova, Claude Cahun, Lee Krasner, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Senga Nengudi, Mieko Shiomi, Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, Harmony Hammond, and Ana Mendieta, among others, hold center stage. Over the course of the semester, students will gain a basic introduction to artistic movements such as Impressionism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Land Art, Fluxus, Conceptual Art and Video Art. Throughout, we will also engage critically with questions of gender and feminist historiography.

From virtual reality environments to hacked machines, AI-generated installations to social media performances, contemporary art has come to increasingly reflect the overwhelming technologization of the world in which we live. Yet how contemporary is technology in art? Are paradigms of ‘new media’ and ‘the digital’ as epochal as they seem, or are they part of a much longer history of media, technics and aesthetics? With an eye towards better understanding our historical present, this course looks broadly at art and its relation to technology, 1900-present.

In this course, we will look closely at historical episodes in which artists have engaged explicitly with technology within their work. We will also scrutinize the complex ways in which technology informs the production, exhibition, and reception of contemporary art, even when not explicitly figured within it. This seminar draws on a diversity of disciplinary perspectives, culling readings from fields of art history, art conservation, museum studies, the history of technology, and media studies. At the end of the term, students will have a historical familiarity with art about technology, as well as a more theoretical understanding of current debates about technology in art.