American Consumer Culture, Fall 2001

Abstract:: Examines how and why twentieth-century Americans came to define the "good life" through consumption, leisure, and material abundance. Explores how such things as department stores, advertising, mass-produced cars, and suburbs transformed the American economy, society, and politics.

Modern Art and Mass Culture, Spring 2004

Abstract:: Examines significant episodes in the history of modern art from the end of the enlightenment to the early twentieth-century in relation to emerging visual technologies (lithography, photography, the poster, photomontage), urban audiences, and consumer culture. Major artistic movements (Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism) are discussed along with theoretical writings about the relationship between avant-garde artistic practices and mass culture. No previous knowledge of art history is required. This class provides an introduction to modern art and theories of modernism and postmodernism. It focuses on the way artists use the tension between fine art and mass culture to mobilize a critique of both. We will examine objects of visual art including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and video. These objects will be viewed in their interaction with advertising, caricature, comics, graffiti, television, fashion, folk art, and so-called "primitive" art.

Abstract:: Subject offers a cross-cultural and trans-historical perspective on the problems of catastrophe and the process of memorializing. It asks what media and various art forms can offer to the project of collective memory. It engages key texts on the notion of "ground zero" in the urban cultures of Europe and Japan, and draws from them a provisional theoretical framework with which to analyze the public responses to the World Trade Center attacks. Topics covered include: The Enola Gay controversy, architectural sites at Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the aesthetic and iconographic dimensions of the events of September 11, and the media influence on our perception of global commerce, transportation systems, surveillance, non-Western cultures and oppositional political formations. Authors include Robert Musil, Maurice Halbwachs, Shusaku Arakawa, Michael Hogan, Ariella Azoulay, Chomsky, Freud, and Edward Said. Taught in English.