|
|
|
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Adorno on "Culture Industry"
Critical Theory of Art as Social Subjectivity
Theodor W. Adorno has been best known for his scathing critique of "culture industry." What is usually missed is that Adorno's critique of 20th Century cultural forms was dialectical, concerned with their critical potential for both emancipation and domination, and sought to comprehend modern practices of both "hermetic" art and "popular" culture, implicating reflexively the categories and concerns of his own cultural criticism, and thus anticipating issues in "post"-modernism. For Adorno, reflecting critically upon the significance of modern aesthetic forms such as those of the media of cinema, radio, television (and now, the internet) involves the critical theory of the viewer-listener-subject, common to both "high" art and "culture industry." In this course we address the Frankfurt School critical theory of the historical transformations of experience and aesthetic subjectivity in modern social life in context, reading works of the 1920s-30s by Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, and then focusing on works by Adorno in considering the analytical and explanatory as well as critical power of certain enduring if problematic and contested categories such as "commodification" and "democratization" for a dialectic of modern forms of art and culture as forms of social subjectivity.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism (ARTHI 4804-001)
and Visual and Critical Studies (Topics: VCS 4010-nnn)
Spring 2004, Spring 2005, Spring 2006, Spring 2007, Spring 2008, Spring 2009, Spring 2010, Spring 2011 [syllabus]
|
|
| |
|
Benjamin and History
The Future of the Subject
Walter Benjamin's cultural criticism sought to grasp the nature of the dramatic social upheavals and transformations of his time (1892-1940). His work tried to discern emancipatory possibilities in contemporary social developments and the emergence of new cultural forms such as photography and cinema, but it was nonetheless preoccupied by problems of recovering past social and cultural history. His stated goal was to grasp the nature of modern forms of being and consciousness and their transformations of subjectivity and experience. In readings from Benjamin's major essays, this course seeks the critical intention of his cryptic utterances on problems of modern subjectivity in social history, which have provoked musings on presence, temporality, memory, and the sense of history in modern and present-day social and cultural criticism. Other readings include works from among Benjamin's sources in criticism, literature and philosophy: Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Bergson, Proust, Kafka, Brecht and Breton.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism (ARTHI 4806/5814-001)
Fall 2004 [Fall '04 course homepage], Fall 2006, Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Fall 2009, Fall 2010 [syllabus]
|
|
| |
|
Critical Art
The Philosophy of Modernism
Several questions are paradigmatic for the study of 19th and 20th (and now 21st) Century art, including: How might we understand and explain modern art's increasingly radical practices? How does subjectivity become the critical object of diverse artistic practices? How does "art" itself emerge as a specifically modern and critical category of aesthetics? Readings range from late 18th - early 19th Century philosophers Kant, Schiller and Hegel, through Nietzsche's criticism of the values of social and aesthetic modernity (for which the opposition of Bizet's Carmen to Wagner's Parsifal reveals the crisis and bad faith), to 20th Century critics of modern art and society Lukács, Marcuse and Adorno, as attempts to grasp the emergence of modernism in art, the peculiarities of modern artistic practices and the critical possibilities of their subjectivity to the present. Poetry by Wordsworth and Celan provide framing and contrasting (early 19th and late 20th Century) examples for considering the subjectivity for modern art.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism (ARTHI 4703-001)
Fall 2005, Fall 2006, Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Spring 2010, Fall 2010 [syllabus]
|
|
| |
|
Critical Society
Marx and Marxism
Philosophy and Modernity
The issues of modern philosophy have been inseparable from critical aspects of social modernity. From the 18th Century Enlightenment and 1789 French Revolution to the social revolutions of the 19th and 20th Centuries, philosophers have radically interrogated problems of consciousness and subjectivity in terms of modern society, and have been concerned with possibilities for social transformation and emancipation. This course proceeds from early liberal political and economic critiques by Rousseau and Smith to philosophies of social modernity by Kant and Hegel, and the critique and attempt to get beyond the problems of modern society by Marx and his followers Lukács, Korsch and Adorno.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Department of Liberal Arts (Topics: HUM 3330-002)
Spring 2007 [poster], Spring 2009 [syllabus]
|
|
| |
|
Introduction to Critical Theory
From the Frankfurt School to the October group
Through the close reading of key texts in the history of Critical Theory, focusing on writers in and around the Frankfurt School, this course traces the development of the theory of the critical social concerns of modern (and so-called "post"-modern) art to the present. Critical theorists of modern art and society we read include Marx, Trotsky, Lukács, Kracauer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Adorno, Greenberg, Barthes, and Foucault; and our consideration of the history of the critical theory of modern art is framed by recent writings by Susan Buck-Morss and Robert Pippin, the historic debate on the nature and character of (post)modernism by Habermas and Lyotard, and a case study of the founding of the art journal October.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism (ARTHI 3700-001)
Summer 2005, Summer 2009 [syllabus]
|
|
| |
|
Media and Modernity
Spectacle and Society
With the advent in the 19th Century of modern media (newspapers, photography, etc.) and the social-political emergence of "the masses," a set of problems developed concerning the structuring role of media in society. Through the development of various forms of culture industry in the 20th Century -- the bestseller, tabloid journalism, recorded music, cinema, radio, television, the internet, etc. -- we have arrived at the "spectacular" culture of the present. How does "mass"/"popular" culture in modern media inform our lives -- even the most intimate of our relations? What do these cultural forms say about our social reality? This course investigates these questions through viewing and reading about art of modern media: seminal works of early cinema; works by media artists such as Ruttmann, Eisenstein, Vertov, Buñuel, Hitchcock, Deren, Brakhage, Schneemann, Resnais, Godard, Marker, et al.; and writings by Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno, Debord, Baudrillard, et al.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism (ARTHI 2800-001)
and Visual and Critical Studies (Topics: VCS 3001-nnn)
Fall 2005 [syllabus]
|
|
| |
|
Modern and Postmodern Art
This course surveys late nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Basic formal, contextual, and technical developments are discussed in relation to socioeconomic, intellectual, and cultural trends. Emphasis is placed on theoretical and critical issues. This course has several different components addressing canonical issues of modernism and postmodernism in art, including: 1.) Habermas and Lyotard; 2.) Greenberg, Clark and Fried; 3.) Marx and Marxism (including Trotsky, Lukács and Althusser); 4.) Baudelaire and Nietzsche; 5.) Kracauer, Benjamin and Adorno; 6.) Barthes and Foucault; 7.) the October journal writers (Krauss, Crimp, and Foster). It includes consideration of issues in the history of visual art as well as literature and music, and so would apply to students from across various different disciplines.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism (ARTHI 5002-002)
Spring 2011 [syllabus]
|
|
| |
|
The Museum of Art
Postmodernism and Critique
The institution of art is a distinctly modern phenomenon whose meaning and importance have been in contention since its emergence in the late 18th - early 19th Centuries: in the wake of the Enlightenment and the 1789 French Revolution. Through the close reading of arguments and texts in the critical theory of modern art, this course traces a history of the institution of art and its critique to the present, focusing on Marxian critical social theories of art, poststructuralist critiques of art as ideology, and the postmodernist critique of the modern institution of art by the October group: Benjamin and Adorno; Barthes and Foucault; and Crimp, Foster, Krauss, Owens, et al.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Department of Arts Administration (ARTSAD 4802-001)
Fall 2006 [syllabus]
|
|
| |
|
Origins of Modernism, France 1848-71
Painting, Poetics, Politics
This course investigates 1848-71 in France as a period critical in the emergence and development of modern artistic practices, evincing fundamental transformations in social and aesthetic subjectivity. The course investigates and reflects upon questions and problems of the social history of art through the topics of Romanticism and Baudelaire's aesthetic, Courbet and "Realism," Manet and "Modernism," and "Impressionism." Critical issues in the historiography of modern art are presented through readings from monographs on Courbet and Manet by T. J. Clark and Michael Fried, framed by their debate on the nature and character of modernism. Discussions include works by other artists of this period and milieu, Delacroix, Daumier, Millet, Caillebotte, Degas, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, Seurat, et al.; and writings by contemporaries such as Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Heinrich Heine, Stéphane Mallarmé, Karl Marx and Théophile Thoré, and by subsequent, 20th Century and present-day art critics and historians such as Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, Arnold Hauser, Meyer Schapiro, Albert Boime and Linda Nochlin.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism (ARTHI 4870-001)
Spring 2004*, Fall 2005, Spring 2008, Summer 2009 , Summer 2010, Spring 2011 [syllabus], Summer 2011
(* co-instructor: Stephanie Karamitsos)
|
|
| |
|
Psychoanalysis and Society
Freud and after
Freud's psychotherapeutic practice and analytic theory of the complex nature of the human psyche, for instance his "discovery" of unconscious mental processes, were profoundly influential for a variety of thinkers and practitioners, including Frantz Fanon, and critical theorists of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor W. Adorno. In this course, we read widely from Freud's writings and those he influenced, including the above authors, with attention to the societal implications of Freud's approach to subjectivity.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Department of Liberal Arts (SOCSCI 3770-001)
Fall 2007 [syllabus]
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Power, Identity, and Resistance
University of Chicago
Social Sciences Collegiate Division (SOSC 11100 and 11200)
Autumn 2002, Winter 2005
|
|
| |
|
Self, Culture, and Society
[course readings: articles (PDF files)]
University of Chicago
Social Sciences Collegiate Division (SOSC 12100, 12200 and 12300)
Spring 2005, Winter 2006, Spring 2006, Winter 2007, Spring 2007, Autumn 2007, Winter 2008, Spring 2008, Autumn 2008, Winter 2009 [syllabus], Spring 2009 [syllabus], Autumn 2009, Autumn 2010 [syllabus]
|
|
|