SELCS

Modern Art and Mass Culture


Course code: ELCS6022
Tutor: Dr Ernest Schonfield
Level: intermediate
Mode of Assessment: 2 assessed essays of 2000 words each
Term: taught in term 1

Course Description:
The course will examine modern art in the context of its relationship with forms of mass culture including advertising, print media, and photography. Although some modernist movements defined themselves in opposition to mass culture, many modern artists engaged in a productive dialogue with mass culture: Impressionists were inspired by photography and by commercial posters; Cubists used newspaper collage; Futurists and Constructivists embraced the new machine aesthetic; Dadaists invented photomontage techniques; Surrealists combined found images and objects; Bauhaus designers fused art and industry; and Pop artists reworked images from popular culture. In the last few decades, postmodern artists such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Orlan and Cindy Sherman have adapted techniques used in advertising. The course will focus on visual practices of this kind which reflect upon the interrelations between individual creativity and consumer society. In doing so, the course will consider the following questions: to what extent is modern art informed by mass culture, and to what extent is there a convergence between modern art and commercial practices?

Primary Texts:

  • Alex Danchev (ed.), 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists (London: Penguin, 2011)
  • Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg (eds.), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), Chapter 17: ‘Designing the New World: Modern Architecture and the Bauhaus’, pp. 429-453
  • F. T. Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. by Günter Berghaus, trans. by Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)
  • Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (London: Penguin, 2007)

Initial Secondary Bibliography:

  • Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp and Avant-Gardism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)
  • Peter Bürger, Theory of the avant-garde, trans. by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press , 1984)
  • Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art since 1900: modernism antimodernism postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007)
  • Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low: modern art, popular culture (New York: Musuem of Modern Art / H. N. Abrams, 1990)