PHIL 109 - Aesthetics: Modern American Art (FA22)
Focusing on developments in the postwar American art scene, this class offers students a historical and philosophical introduction to the meaning of contemporary art. The main goal of the course is to help students philosophically contextualize the question regarding the meaning of art today by looking at writings by influential artists and critics of, roughly, the last eighty years. Through discussion and writing, students of this course will strengthen their visual literacy in contemporary art, and familiarize themselves with different genres of art criticism. Chronologically, the topics that will be covered in this class include Abstract Expressionism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, Neo-Dada, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Site-Specificity and Land Art, Art as Social Critique, Performance Art and Feminist Art, and Art and Race; finally, we will look at the legacy of Pop Art and Street Art. The artists whose work we will analyze include Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Hans Haacke, Judy Chicago, Hannah Wilke, Faith Ringgold, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons.