Previous course offerings can be found here.
ARTH 102
Art History II. 3 Units
Prof. Erin Benay
MWF 10:35-11:25
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ARTH 260
Art In Early Modern Europe
Prof. Erin Benay
MW 12:45pm-2pm
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ARTH 545
Seminar in Medieval Art
Prof. Elina Gertsman
W 12:45pm-3:15pm
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ARTH 286
Intro to Contemporary Art
Prof. Benjamin Murphy
TR 1pm-2:15pm
This course offers an overview of the major trends and developments that have shaped the visual arts from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with the radical break from modernism inaugurated by Pop art, the course will move through styles and movements such as minimalism, conceptual art, postmodernism, body art and performance, concluding with a consideration of artistic practices of the present day that take digital platforms, screen-mediated experience, and other dimensions of contemporary life as their medium of experimentation. The class will take a global perspective on these developments, emphasizing the intersecting trajectories of art made in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and other spheres outside the traditional canonical centers of Europe and the United States. Through this global view, the course will explore how artistic practice has critically engaged pressing questions that have structured the past half century including war, conflict, and violence; migration, diaspora, and (de)colonization; struggles for racial, gender, sexual, and Indigenous rights; and current states of emergency amid democratic collapse and climate catastrophe. The course will actively engage the Cleveland Museum of Art, with lectures, discussions, and student projects centered on the museum’s collections.
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ARTH 571
Seminar in Contemporary Art
Prof. Benjamin Murphy
W 10am – 12:30pm
What is art’s role within our increasingly complex global economy? Is it just another luxury commodity, to be bought, sold, and insured? Or can art critique, and perhaps even disrupt, the process of commodity exchange itself? This seminar explores these questions by surveying modern and contemporary artists who explicitly use money and other financial instruments as their medium. From early twentieth-century iconoclasts ironically appropriating coins and paper currency, to postwar conceptualists who manipulated contracts, bonds and other “dematerialized” financial instruments, to contemporary creators who make digital works based on the structure of cryptocurrency, artists have often sought to blur the boundaries between art’s aesthetic value, its financial value, and its material form. Tracking these artistic blurrings, we will dive into some of the major theorizations of modern capitalism and its alternatives across a range of fields including critical theory and postcolonial studies, with the goal of developing conceptual tools for analyzing the ways in which art embraces, or resists, monetization. The course will focus on the Americas, drawing from scholarship that has analyzed how the historical dynamics that structured the experience of modernity throughout the American hemisphere – namely colonization, enslavement, extraction, and dispossession – functioned as the central motors for the emergence our current condition of globalized capitalism.
ARTH 393/493
Contemporary Art: Critical Directions
Prof Ksenis Un Pavlenko
MW 3:20pm-4:35pm
Image caption: Suchitra Mattai, she walked in reverse and found their songs, 2024. Image detail on the right. Source: artist’s website.
Media Histories of the Visual Construction of Race
When did looking become politicized in racial terms? How do art, media, and visual cultures enforce racial hierarchies and systems of difference? Which picturing strategies transfer across media and are there formal conventions that are unique to certain image-making techniques?
This course explores how art and visual culture shaped modern understandings of race, from the eighteenth century to present in a global context. We will examine a range of media and art, including orientalist painting, installations, moving image works, and drone imaging. Reading assignments will offer theoretical frameworks to mine visual materials for histories of race-making, which can be both jarring and elusive. Course requirements are designed to develop a critical awareness of the medium-specific strategies of art that continue to inflect discourse on race. Along with written assignments, students will be asked to produce an annotated media portfolio on a topic of their choice from the position of an artist, curator, journalist, scholar, or archivist.
War Games: Videogames and the US Military
Prof. Steven Ciampaglia
R 7pm-9:30pm
This course examines the longstanding and symbiotic relationship between the commercial videogame industry and the US Military, or what has been called the Military-Entertainment Complex. The first videogame, Spacewar!, was created by computer researchers at MIT in 1962, using nascent computer technology funded by the US Department of Defense. Since then, the commercial videogame industry has grown in tandem with—and partly thanks to—the US Military’s development of computer and digital technologies. Today, military-themed videogames have come to dominate the gaming industry and gamer culture. Indeed, the ubiquity of these games has facilitated the US Military’s recruitment efforts. Games such as America’s Army and Call of Duty present seductive depictions of armed combat and military service and specifically target young gamers. Enlisted soldiers are trained for actual warfare on simulators that are nearly indistinguishable from games. The line between “real” and “virtual” combat has become increasingly blurred, further conflating war with fun and games, and eclipsing moral and ethical concerns about the relationship between technology and violence.
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