Art & Money
Art’s relationship to money has long been fraught. On the one hand, art supposedly places individual expression above the profit motive, yet on the other hand, artworks circulate as expensive luxury commodities. How can artworks be unique, non-fungible cultural objects yet also vehicles for collateralized debt, money laundering, tax evasion, speculative investment, and real estate development? Has art simply become money? Can money be art? This course examines these, and other contradictions, about the long and complicated entanglement of art and money in modernity with particular attention on the period since the 1960s. We will address theories of value, trace the history of the art market, interrogate the politics of arts funding, explore the so-called financialization of art, look at ways artists have represented, exploited, or challenged the connections between art and money, and consider art’s role within the broader economic system. This topic is cross listed with ECON 216.
Surrealism and Women
This course will explore the artistic and literary movement of Surrealism that emerged in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Born in the years just after World War I, Surrealism aimed to destroy conventional modes of artistic and literary representation through what they called a Surrealist “revolution.” The Surrealists read the works of Freud, Marx, Sade and Lautréamont; they aimed to destroy bourgeois cultural traditions including the family, the state, and organized religion. And although many of the Surrealists were men, women artists and writers were deeply connected to Surrealism. In this course, we will focus on the work of these women artists and the specific ways they created work that explored notions of female power, desire, embodiment, and political activism. Although we will primarily focus on artists of the 1930s-1970s, we will explore how contemporary artists continue to mine Surrealist artistic strategies to disrupt dominant cultural, social and artistic paradigms to challenge ideas about how “women” might be represented.