This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

 

Calendar

WEEK # LECTURE TOPICS RECITATION TOPICS KEY DATES
1 Modernity, Modernism, Modernization

Lecture 1: Introduction to Theories of Modernism and Modernity

Lecture 2: Introduction to Theories of Mass Culture
Discuss Readings and Video (View Excerpt in Recitation?) [Marxism's Blindness to Feminism; The Woman "Arranged for the Gaze," Conflation of Subject-in-Representation with the Real, Marxism as theory and interpretation as practice]  
2 Post-Revolutionary France

Lecture 3: Eugéne Delacroix, or How to Imagine Liberty

Lecture 4: Caricature and the Safehouse of "High Art"
View and Discuss Video: Pictures Beneath the Cobblestones: July 28, 1830, Liberty Leading the People

Discuss writing strategies for first paper
 
3 Realism and The Painting of Modern Life

Lecture 5: Courbet, Realism, and Popular Images
Discuss Realism

How does allegory function in Courbet's Modernism?
 
4 Impressionism, Photography, Serialism

Lecture 6: Manet and Modernization

Lecture 7: The Impressionist Eye as Camera
Discuss Clark's Concept of Urban Spectacle, and Baudelaire's Modernism

How do photography and fashion function for both thinkers?
Paper 1 due
5 Modernist Anxiety: "Where are we going?"

Lecture 8: Serial Impressions (Print and Eye)
Two Field Trips in place of Recitations  
6 Primitivism / Woman / Mass Culture

Lecture 9: Woman and the Modern City

Lecture 10: European Orientalism and Gauguin's Skirt
Exam Review and Preview (bring questions)  
7 Cubo-Futurism and the Sign

Lecture 11: Picasso's Cubism: Politics and/or Semiosis

Lecture 12: Futurism's and Dadaism's Popular Mechanics
Discuss the Persistence of Orientalism through early Picasso Midterm exam
8 Commodities

Lecture 12 (cont.): Bauhaus Film
Discuss Theories of the Fetish and Commodity Culture

Did Bauhaus Artists develop a Utopian Theory of the Commodity?
Paper 2 due
9 Photography, Propaganda, Montage

Lecture 13: (Sur)realism and Photography

Lecture 14: The Soviet Avant-Garde
Meet at Busch-Reisinger Collection (Harvard Art Museums) for discussion of Montage, Graffiti, and other "Mass Cultural" Influences in modern art  
10 Postwar Primitives

Lecture 15: Anti-culture? Dubuffet, Graffiti, and Art of the Insane

Lecture 16: The Jackson Pollock Case
Discuss Readings - How does Culture become Marketable, and how do market goods become cultural?

Review strategies for Final Paper
 
11 Marketing Mass Culture

Lecture 17: Robert Rauschenberg's "Coca-Cola Plan"
  Paper 3 due
12 Pop Art and Popular Culture

Lecture 18: International Pop and Anti-Pop

Lecture 19: American Pop and the "Business Art Business"
Discuss Horkheimer and Adorno (from week 10)

Screen Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" (if possible)

Discuss Readings
 
13 Postmodernism and Mass Media

Lecture 20: Postmodernism and Institutional Critique

Lecture 21: Postmodernism, Feminism
Discuss Readings and "Map" Postmodernism

Exam Review
Paper 4 due
14 The Collapse, or Renewal, of Aesthetic Distance?

Lecture 22: Report on the Present: Fashion Culture, Culture Fashion

Lecture 23: Last class, Discussion and Review
No recitation this week, but there will be exam review sessions  
15     Final exam