Introduction to Art Worlds I: Situating Modernity
The John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in
Humanities and Social Thought
Fall 2011
Course No. DRAP-GA.1106 / Class No. 1987
Tuesday 6.20-8.20 – Draper Conference Room
Instructor: Dr. Mario A. Caro
Description:
Modernity can be described as radical rupture, a break from a past that, as a result, is
irreversibly inscribed as tradition. In this course we will investigate the ways in which
modernity is itself continuously reinvented in order to distance the dynamic present from a
reified past. We will pay particular attention to how the aesthetics of modernism have come
to serve conceptualizations of the individual within nationalism, the primitive versus the West,
and the historical as opposed to the timeless universal. Central to this investigation will be an
assessment of the ideological deployment of modernism within disciplinary discourses that
codify subjectivity and otherness. Thus, the role of the artist as avant-garde revolutionary
within politics
Some themes to be explored:
The Making of Time and History
Of Revolutions and the Avant-Garde
Mobility and Modernism: Diasporas, Colonialism, and Indigeneity
Public (and) Art
Gendered Aesthetics
The Nostalgia and Trauma of Nation Building
Postcoloniality and Postmodernism
Identity and Otherness
Methodologies of Empire
Worlding Museums
Authors we will read include:
H.W. Hegel, Johannes Fabian, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière, Svetlana Boym, Ulrich
Baer, Kobena Mercer, Jean Fisher, Ian McLean, Steven Mansbach, Mieke Bal, Douglas
Crimp, Hal Foster, Grant Kester, Miwon Kwon, Bruno Latour, Rosalind Krauss.