Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996
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, feminist discourses, history of modernism and the avant-garde, postmodernism, speaking positions in cultural studies; 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 Critical text analsis (1500 words): 20% + Seminar paper (2500 words): 35% + Essay (3500 words): 45%