Institutional Critique credit:

3 Hours

Institutions—from the museum to the university—overwhelmingly frame the terms and conditions by which we encounter art and come to know what matters most in the so-called art world. This seminar focuses on artistic and activist efforts devised to bring these institutional frameworks into greater public view. Our primary concern will be to examine theories and practices of institutional critique, a genre of artmaking and mode of analysis that is often periodized as emerging in the 1970s and that was extensively conceptualized in the 1990s. We will also study its earlier twentieth century precedents and continued reverberations today. 3 undergraduate hours. No graduate credit. Prerequisite: Restricted to students with junior standing or consent of the instructor.