VISUAL ARTS

This course will explore essential concepts and practices that define the art field. It will introduce students to dominating methodologies that are used to read and analyse images and visual experiences both from historical and contemporary perspectives. It will cover milestone art movements from the Late Modern period until today while problematising the centrality of European art-historical canon. The course will prioritise interdisciplinary approaches and will include case-studies ranging from painting and photography to television and film.

The students will develop an understanding of the role of the arts as a form of knowledge production and increase their visual literacy. Through the course units which connect the contents of lectures with seminar materials, they will become familiar with key trends in art practice from the mid-19th century to nowadays alongside various interpretive tools. They will be encouraged to cultivate a critical attitude towards the issues considered in the course and to develop basic research skills. Students will be able to relate social, cultural, and political issues to works of art, their display, and any visual production.

The students are required to read the texts and watch materials related to the assignments and be ready to discuss them in class.

Unit 1. Visual culture, visual power, visual arts.
What is visual? Art as a visual form and as practice. Concepts of civilisation, class, and cultural capital as applied to visual arts.

Unit 2. Art history: key ideas and methods.
Art-historical analysis: formal, iconographical, socio-historical. The issue of value. Western canon: why line up objects in time? Chronology, historical context, style, iconography, patrons.
- Seminar. High and Low through the lens of the 20th century: Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (1969) VS John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) television series.

Unit 3. Modernity and visual perception. Art as a cultural category of the modern age.

Unit 4. 19th-century European viewer.
Academies and centralisation in arts. Colonialism, oriental imagery, and international exhibitions. Bourgeois society and art market. City as the set and the vehicle of visual arts.

Unit 5. National and international: from World Fairs culture to cosmopolitan avant-gardes.

Unit 6. Museum as the ‘apparatus of representation’.
The logic of public art collection. Institutional critique. Modern art and the exhibition space: the case of the MoMA in New York.

Unit 7. Art as Forum.
Institutional layout of the art system after WWII. Mass culture, consumerism, postmodernism. Venice Biennale, its history and present. Global art world VS Global art history. Post-colonialism and art practice.

Unit 8. Photography: limitations and bias of the medium. Film, theatre, performance, Video Art, New Media.

Unit 9. Art history and gender.
- Seminar. Feminist art histories: reading L. Nochlin’s ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ and discussing 2022 Venice Biennale ‘The Milk of Dreams’.

Unit 10. Environmental crisis in art practice.

J. Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin, 2008 or other editions.
M. A. Staniszewski, “Art and the Modern Subject,” in Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art, Penguin, 1995, pp. 101-110.
R. Brettell, Modern Art, 1851-1929: Capitalism and Representation, Oxford University Press, 1999.
T.J. Clark, “Introduction,” in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 3-22.
“The social history of art: models and concepts,” in H. Foster, R. Krauss, Y.-A. Bois, B. H. D. Buchloh, D. Joselit, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Thames and Hudson, 2004, pp. 22-31.
D. Hopkins, After Modern Art: 1945-2017, Oxford University Press, 2018.
S. Sontag, On Photography, chapters ‘The Image-World’ and ‘A Brief Anthology of Quotations’, any edition.
L. Nochlin, C. Grant, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (50th Anniversary Edition), Thames and Hudson Limited, 2021.
M. Fowkes, R. Fowkes, Art and Climate Change, Thames and Hudson, 2022.

The assessment will include the following criteria:
- seminars engagement 30%
- essay 40%
- oral exam with flashcards 30%

Lectures
Inquiry-based seminars and classroom discussions (based on texts, visual material, individual and group experiences) will be scheduled in connection to several units.

English

written and oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Poverty and inequalities" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development