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Theories and Trends in Contemporary Art, Media, and Culture

Course guide

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This course-specific research guide aims to provide guidance and support for students taking "Theories and Trends in Contemporary Art, Media, and Culture" at Otis.


About this Course

This class covers the paradigm shift from modernity to contemporary culture through an analysis of these general and closely interrelated themes; your faculty will select which they emphasize, but all of these should be familiar to you when you complete this class:

  • Race in Contemporary Art and Media Culture 
  • Bodies in Contemporary Art and Media Culture 
  • Gender in Contemporary Art and Media Culture
  • Technologies in Contemporary Art and Media Culture 
  • Identity in Contemporary Art and Media Culture 
  • Consumerism in Contemporary Art and Media Culture 
  •  Hi-Low Art/Design in Contemporary Art and Media Culture 

Contemporary art, design, and media involve multi-dimensional social and artistic shifts taking us from “late modern” society into the so-called “post-modern” age. The class covers years beginning after World War II, marked by society-altering ideas and events that radically change how we view creatives, art, design, entertainment, technology, race, gender, and identity in a global context.  

We will learn what these terms mean, why they're important to working artists/designers, and how ideas and events from the 1960s up through the current day impact fields from fine art to digital media to fashion and graphic design. Conversely, we look at how art and design work to create who we are and how we think. 

We look at the global impact of the spread of TV, video, computers, the internet, the civil rights movements, including #Blacklivesmatter and BIPOC initiatives, gender rights revolutions, including the feminist movements, LGBTQ+ culture, and various other multi-cultural and counter-cultural perspectives like Latinx and Asian art movements.  

We study how global contemporary art and design are impacted by legacies of European ethnocentrism and how multi-disciplinary contemporary art fields recognize diverse subject positions to both reflect and challenge Western white colonial and patriarchal power.


Learning Objectives

  • Analyze important themes of contemporary art, design, and media culture.
  • Understand/analyze the difference between so-termed "modern" and so-termed "post-modern" society, art, design, media, and discourse; know what these words signify and why they are important to artists. 
  • Understand/analyze the unique social, political, and economic events that have led to the current world that artists and consumers know today. 
  • Understand/analyze normalized and marginalized subject positions/identities in contemporary global society. 
  • Understand/analyze the contemporary mechanisms of taste, value, and exclusion operating within and challenged by art made in the US and the broader global world 
  • Understand/analyze and critique Eurocentrism, racism, ableism, patriarchy, and class privilege reflected in theories, media, and practices of contemporary art in the US and the broader global art arena. 
  • Practice locating, evaluating, and critically using library and electronic sources and digital platforms, as well as hard copy textual content.
  • Practice using all information gathering/research tools like AI in ways that respect creative integrity and comply with the revised Otis Plagiarism Policy.
  • Understand and analyze key events/crossroads that take global culture from modernism(s) and post-modernism (s)-- all faculty will incorporate these key historical events: 
     
    • WW II
    • Atomic era (might mention the Anthropocene era)
    • Cold War
    • Decolonization/formation of the Global South
    • Vietnam War
    • Civil Rights Movement
    • Communist revolutions (China, Cuba)
    • Assassinations of Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X
    • TV-Video invention
    • Stonewall Uprising
    • First computers
    • Global Feminisms
    • AIDs epidemic
    • NEA controversy
    • Culture Wars of the 80s-90s
    • Fall of the Berlin Wall
    • Global capitalism – multinational corporations
    • The Internet
    • Sony releases the Playstations in Japan
    • 9/11--World Trade Towers
    • War on Terror
    • AI
    • Trump, revived culture wars
    • Covid-19

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