ARTS1452: Late Twentieth-Century Art

Abstract

This course is about art in New York City. From the downtown bohemia where artists lived to the midtown museums and galleries where they exhibited their work, from the spatial interventions of the avant-garde to the market-domination of auction houses, Manhattan emerged as the global epicenter of art in the late twentieth-century. Beginning with the “triumph” of Abstract Expressionism after World War II, this course will track the emergence of movements such as Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism in the cultural and geographical context of the city. We will then look at the proliferation of new media – site-specific art, video, performance, installation – and the rise of photography in the globalizing art world of the late twentieth century. It will ultimately become clear that this entire history turns on the epochal transition from modernism to postmodernism. Consequently, broader questions of autonomy, intention, value, and identity – especially gender identity – will be consistent concerns throughout the semester.