4.602
Modern Art and Mass Culture
Introduction to theories of modernism and postmodernism and their related forms (roughly 18th century to present) in art and design. Focuses on how artists use the tension between fine art and mass culture to critique both. Examines visual art in a range of genres, from painting to design objects and "relational aesthetics." Works of art are viewed in their interaction with advertising, caricature, comics, graffiti, television, fashion, "primitive" art, propaganda, and networks on the internet. Additional work required of students taking graduate version. Limited to 15.
Spring 2012
Topics
- Introduction to Theories of Modernism and Modernity
- Introduction to Theories of Mass Culture
- Eugène Delacroix, or How to Imagine Liberty
- Caricature and the Safehouse of “High Art”
- Courbet, Realism, and Popular Images / ASCO preview
- Manet: Flâneurs and Flâneuses in the Modernizing City / ASCO
- European Orientalism: Camille’s Kimono and Gauguin’s Skirt
- The Impressionist Eye as Camera
- Serial Impressions (Print and Eye)
- Picasso’s Cubism: Politics and/or Semiosis
- The Soviet Avant-Garde
- Futurism’s and Dadaism’s Popular Mechanics
- In and Around Duchamp
- Irrational / Rational Production: Surrealism vs. The Bauhaus Idea
- Anti-culture? Dubuffet, Pollock, and Premonitions of the Postmodern
- Robert Rauschenberg’s Coca-Cola Plan / International Pop
- The “Business Art Business,” Globalism vs. Globalization
- Postmodernism, Spectacle, and Institutional Critique
- Postmodernism and Feminism
- New Media / Mass Media / Sensory Reconfigurations
- Biennial Culture and the Aesthetics of Experience
- Present-day Strategies Vis-a-vis Art and Mass Culture
Readings
- Barnet, Sylvan. A Short Guide to Writing About Art . 7th ed. Prentice Hall, 2002. ISBN: 9780321101440.
- [Harrison] = Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. 2nd ed. Blackwell Publishing, 2002. ISBN: 9780631227083.
- [Foster] = Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, et al. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Vols. 1&2 . 2nd ed. Thames and Hudson, 2011. ISBN: 9780500289518.
- [Frascina] = Frascina, Francis, and Jonathan Harris, eds. Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts. Phaidon Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780714828404.
- Berger, John. Chapters 1 and 7 in Ways of Seeing. Penguin Group, 2009. ISBN: 9780141035796.
- Williams, Raymond. Entries on “Art,” “Culture,” “Masses,” “Modern,” and “Popular”. In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society . Oxford University Press, 1985. ISBN: 9780195204698.
- 3 · Eugène Delacroix, or How to Imagine Liberty · Pointon, Marcia. “Liberty on the Barricades: Woman, Politics and Sexuality in Delacroix (1986).” Chapter 3 in Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830-1908 . Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN: 9780521409995.
- Field trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see Monet’s La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume) , 1876, and other paintings.
- 4 · Caricature and the Safehouse of “High Art” · Merriman, John M. “‘Philipon Versus Philippe’: The July Monarchy and its Enemies.” In The Pear: French Graphic Arts in the Golden Age of Caricature. Edited by Elise K. Kenney and John M. Merriman. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1991.
- Schapiro, Meyer. “Courbet and Popular Imagery (1941).” In Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers. George Braziller, 2011. ISBN: 9780807616079.
- Nochlin, Linda. “Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading the ‘Painter’s Studio.’” In Courbet Reconsidered . Written by Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin. Yale University Press, 1988. ISBN: 9780300042986.
- 6 · Manet: Flâneurs and Flâneuses in the Modernizing City / ASCO
- Baudelaire, Charles. “The Salon of 1846: On the Heroism of Modern Life.” In Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology . Edited by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison. Sage Publications Limited, 1982. ISBN: 9781853960321.
- ———. Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture . University of California Press, 1990. ISBN: 9780520070745.
- Romo, Tere. “Conceptually Divine: Patssi Valdez’s Vírgen de Guadalupe , Walking the Mural.” In ASCO: Elite of the Obscure. A Retrospective 1972 – 1987. Edited by C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011. ISBN: 9783775730037.
- Chavoya, C. Ondine, and Rita Gonzalez. “Asco and the Politics of Revulsion.” In ASCO: Elite of the Obscure. A Retrospective 1972 – 1987 . Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011. ISBN: 9783775730037.
- ———. Orientalism . Vintage Books, 1979. ISBN: 9780394740676.
- Perry, Gill, Francis Frascina, and Charles Harrison. “Primitivism and the ‘Modern’.” In Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780300055160.
- Nochlin, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient.” In The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society. Westview Press, 1991. ISBN: 9780064301879.
- Spate, Virginia, Gary Hickey, and Claude Monet. “Introduction,” “Modern Life. Modern Vision,” and “The Forces of Nature.” In Monet and Japan . National Gallery of Australia, 2001. ISBN: 9780642541352.
- Baudelaire, Charles. “The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography.” In Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Edited by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison. Sage Publications Limited, 1982. ISBN: 9781853960321.
- Varnedoe, Kirk. “The Artifice of Candor: Impressionism and Photography Reconsidered.” Art in America 68, no. 1 (1980): 66–68.
- Perspectives on Photography: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall. Edited by Peter Walch and Thomas Barrow. Olympic Marketing Corp., 1986. ISBN: 9780826308627.
- Goldwater, Robert. “l’Affiche moderne: A Revival of Poster Art After 1880.” Gazette des Beaux Arts 22, no. 910 (1941): 173–82.
- Krauss, Rosalind. “In the Name of Picasso.” 1981. In [Frascina].
- ———. The Picasso Papers . Diane Publishing Co., 1998. ISBN: 9780756760250.
- Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936. In [Frascina].
- Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” 1939. In [Harrison].
- Crow, Thomas. “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts. " In Modern Art in the Common Culture . Yale University Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780300076493.
- Marinetti, F. T. “The Founding Manifesto of Futurism.” 1909. In [Harrison].
- Jones, Caroline A. “The Sex of the Machine: Mechanomorphic Art, New Women, and Francis Picabia’s Neurasthenic Cure.” In Picturing Science, Producing Art . Edited by Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison. Routledge, 1998. ISBN: 9780415919111.
- Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , Standard Edition, Vol. 21 . Edited by James Strachey. W. W. Norton & Company, 1976. ISBN: 9780393011289.
- Duchamp, Marcel . “The Richard Mutt Case.” 1917. In [Harrison].
- Marx, Karl. “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret.” In Capital, Vol.1: A Critique of Political Economy . Translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin Classics, 1992. ISBN: 9780140445688.
- Pietz, William. “Fetish.” In Critical Terms for Art History . 2nd ed. Edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff. University of Chicago Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780226571683.
- Wood, Paul. “Commodity.” In Critical Terms for Art History . 2nd ed. Edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff. University of Chicago Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780226571683.
- Breton, Andre. Excerpts from “The First Manifesto of Surrealism.” 1924. In [Harrison].
- Bataille, Georges. “The Lugubrious Game.” 1929. In [Harrison].
- Gropius, Walter. “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus.” 1923. In [Harrison].
- Dubuffet, Jean. “Notes for the Well-Lettered.” 1946. In [Harrison].
- ———. “Crude Art Preferred to Cultural Art.” 1949. In [Harrison].
- Foster, Hal. Excerpt from “Postmodernism: A Preface.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture . The New Press, 2002, pp. ix–xii. ISBN: 9781565847422.
- Jameson, Fredric. Excerpt from “Conclusion.” In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism . Verso Books, 1990. ISBN: 9780860913146.
- Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. Continuum International Publishing Group, 1969. ISBN:9780826400932.
- Alloway, Lawrence. “The Arts and the Mass Media.” 1958. In [Harrison].
- Jones, Caroline A. “Coca-Cola Plan Or, How New York Stole the Soul of Giuseppe Panza.” In Panza: The Legacy of a Collector . Written by the Museum of Contemporary Art. Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999. ISBN: 9780914357735.
- Hamilton, Richard. “For the Finest Art, Try Pop.” 1961. In [Harrison].
- Oldenburg, Claes. “Documents from The Store.” 1961. In [Harrison].
- “Andy Warhol: Interview with Gene Swenson.” 1963. In [Harrison].
- “Roy Lichtenstein: Lecture to the College Art Association.” 1964. In [Harrison].
- Jones, Caroline A. “Globalism / Globalization.” In Art and Globalization . Edited by James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim. Penn State Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780271037172.
- Huyssen, Andreas. “Mapping the Postmodern.” In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2008. ISBN: 9781597405553.
- Steinbach, Haim, et al. “From Criticism to Complicity.” 1986. In [Harrison].
- Wodiczko, Krzysztof. “Public Projection.” 1983. In [Harrison].
- Debord, Guy. “Writings from the Situationist International.” 1957–1961. In [Harrison].
- Baudrillard, Jean. “The Hyper-realism of Simulation.” 1976. In [Harrison].
- Huyssen, Andreas. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism . ACLS Humanities E-Book, 2008. ISBN: 9781597405553.
- Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism.” In Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture . Edited by Scott Bryson, et al. University of California Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780520077409.
- Von Hantelmann, Dorothea. “Experience.” In Carsten Höller: Experience. Skira Rizzoli, 2011. ISBN: 9780847837601.
- Moore, Jenny. “Future.” In Carsten Höller: Experience . Skira Rizzoli, 2011. ISBN: 9780847837601.
- Smith, William S. “Optics.” In Carsten Höller: Experience . Skira Rizzoli, 2011. ISBN: 9780847837601.
- Celant, Germano. “Participation.” In Carsten Höller: Experience . Skira Rizzoli, 2011. ISBN: 9780847837601.
Prerequisites & course information
Subject meets with 4.652 Prereq: None Acad Year 2027-2028: U (Spring) Acad Year 2028-2029: Not offered 4-0-8 units. HASS-A; CI-H
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Spring 2012
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- MIT OCW calendar ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.