MONASH UNIVERSITY FACULTY HANDBOOKS

Arts Graduate Handbook 1996

Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996

VAD4020

Theory of art history and criticism

Annette Van den Bosch

Synopsis This subject is organised in four equivalent sections: `Discourses in art history' includes the social history of art, the problem of style in art history, speaking positions in cultural studies; feminist discourses, history of modernism and the avant-garde, postmodernism and, `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 inter textual 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): 35% + Essay (4500 words): 45% + Critical text analysis (1500 words): 20%

Prescribed texts

• Bourdieu P Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste RKP, 1984
• Dougherty T (ed.) Postmodernism: A reader Columbia University Press, 1993
• Frascina F and Harris C Art in modern culture: An anthology of critical texts Open University and Phaidon, 1992
• Grosz L Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism Allen and Unwin, 1994
• Heller A and Feher J (eds) Reconstructing aesthetics: Writing of the Budapest school Basil Blackwell, 1991
• Nead L The female nude: Obscenity and sexuality Routledge 1992
• Turner C (ed.) Tradition and change: Contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific University of Queensland Press, 1993
• `Postmodernism: A consideration of the appropriation of Aboriginal imagery' in S Cramer (ed.) Forum Papers Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1989