ART 345D - Ideas in Contemporary Art

Democracies are founded on a contradiction: equality for all based on common values AND the individualist’s right to be special, different, and unique. This simultaneous appeal to a normative culture which everyone can share and a mandate, whenever possible, to not conform, produces strange partnerships. How does visual art work within this field of competing vectors? Is it the unstated expectation that emerging artists will always be oppositional? Does being contemporary implicitly mean being counter-cultural? Students in this class will address these questions by considering a set of themes that flow out of one central tension: the difference between the “ordinary and the “extraordinary” as subject matter in the history of visual art. We’ll compare the time-tested desire to make art by reframing ordinary, day-to-day experience with Postmodernity’s embrace of contingency, decentralization , and impurity. We’ll then trace a path between the benign forms of ordinary experience and their more negative instantiations as the “banal,” the “abject,” and the “vulgar.”
Units: 4
Course Type: Seminar