Entries for ‘art125’ — 15 articles
Photography has been with us throughout this course. From the very first lecture we talked about the crisis it created in the plastic arts. When technology came along that could capture a person’s likeness completely, traditional artists had to prove they still had something to contribute to society.
In the 1990s the contemporary art scene became much less provincial, and started to look beyond American shores for good contemporary art. This not only included Europe, but the entire rest of the world. We don’t have time to go back and see what was going on everywhere for the last sixty years, but we […]
In this class we back up to the beginning of the course, and start again in Europe. After the Second World War, our attention turned to the American Art scene, but the artistic traditions of Europe continued to evolve as well. Sometimes this paralleled the work we’ve seen so far, and sometimes it followed it’s […]
Today, we cover all of the philosophy for the entire course (promise). We look at the principals we’ve covered so far, and we add in everything we will have reason to discuss for the rest of the semester.
As we saw in our lecture on Feminism, Identity politics starts to play an increasingly important role in contemporary art starting in the 1960s and 1970s. Gone are the days when we can believe art can address a Universal Truth perceived equally by all humanity. Instead, we see artwork exploring a personal or subjective experience.
You will need to choose and Artist for your research paper. The paper should be 2000 words – (approximately 5 pages in length at 1.5 spacing at 12pt type). Pick an artist whose career starts somewhere between 1970 and 2000–that is an established but contemporary artist. Make sure there are enough sources out there for […]
Art 125 Topics in Contemporary Art midterm exam is next week
Today, we look at women artists. And not just artists who are women, but women who make art because they are women. We’ve actually seen women artists already, but less than a quarter of the artists we’ve seen so far happen to be women. The artists we see today are not so happy about a […]
Well, we’re back to The Monk by the Sea, and you’re probably noticing how much I like to reference this piece by now. The distinction I’m making this time is between the classical notion of Man vs. The Wild, and our more contemporary notions of the fragility of the globe.
ART125: homework from Minimalism Readings is due Monday, March 5th.
So here we have a bunch of artists, all basically making boxes and wanting the art world to accept them as Capital “A” Art. So how could it be that none of them get along? Today we look at the Minimalists, and interestingly, we see that the more similar the work of artists is, the […]
Pop Art
February 8th, 2012
The beginning of Pop Art as an artistic movement is often pegged to Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Home’s So Different, So Appealing? and that’s where we start our class today. We also look at our local fathers of Pop, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
This week, we pick up with the end of World War II. We start by looking at two very different images of soldiers. One is by George Grosz, a bleak image of a crippled WW I veteran, reduced to a beggar. The other, by Thomas Hart Benton, shows heroic young Americans heading off to Europe […]
Our course starts in New York in the 1940s, but 35,000 years of recorded art history exist before this point. Before we touch down with both feet running, what should we be aware of, what lessons from the past can we take with us?
Welcome to ART-125 Topics in Contemporary Art