Theory of art history and criticism
A Van den Bosch
10 points * 3 hours per week * First semester * Clayton
This subject is organised in four equivalent sections: discourses in art history includes the social history of art, feminist discourses, history of modernism and the avant-garde, postmodernism and the end of history; aesthetics and commodities considers theories of aesthetic value, meaning and symbolic value, interpretation and consumption of art, and the distribution and exchange value of works of art; forms of visual analysis includes realism and materialism, subjectivity and sexuality, psychoanalytic theories of art and difference, signs and signifying systems in mass media, semiotics and intertextual analysis; current critical perspectives includes primitivism and bricoleurs, postcolonial mimicry and ambivalence, history memory and modernism, difference, desire and the body, gender transgressions, Australian regional exchanges, Aboriginal and Asian.
Assessment
Seminar paper (3000 words): 40% * Essay (4500 words): 50% * Seminar participation: 10%
Preliminary reading
Wolff J The social production of art New York UP, 1984
Prescribed texts
Broude N and Garrard M (eds) The expanding discourse, feminism and art history Harper Collins, 1992
Bourdieu P Distinction, a social critique of the judgement of taste Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984
Connor S Theory and cultural value Blackwell, 1992
Dougherty T (ed.) Postmodernism: A reader Columbia UP, 1993
Frascina F and Harrison J (eds) Art in modern culture: An anthology of critical texts Phaidon, 1992
Huyssen A After the great divide: Modernism, mass culture, postmodernism Indiana UP, 1986