4000 Level Art Administration Course Descriptions

ARTSAD 4802
To the Museum and Beyond
This course critically traces an archeology of postmodern cultural production, display, criticism, and radical political intervention by examining paradigmatic modern cultural institutions in general, and museums in particular. Analyses of modern socio-cultural politics according to Foucault and Benjamin will provide a basis for a critical examination of the cultural economies of which modern museums are the key agents and the materializations. Increasingly, the work of these authors has been taken up and deployed by contemporary cultural historians and theorists as a means of gaining critical perspectives on the complicated relationships between capitalism, urbanism, colonialism, consumerism, and, in the more critically adventurous cases, sexism, racism, and classicism.