Contemporary Art: Images, Concepts, Ideas ★ 4.912

This course offers a survey of contemporary art from the late 1950s to the present time, including modern trends and ideas in the ever-changing world of art. It introduces the visual arts and explains its history using painting, installations, environments, and performances. The course combines proper historical methods with an emphasis on the artist's unique position and function. Special attention is given to the interpretation of an artwork based upon its social and political context

This course is for international students interested in studying contemporary art or planning to use the knowledge to implement international socio-cultural projects and exhibitions.

This course is for students, artists, and thinkers who wish to understand contemporary art processes better. This course is for you if you plan to use the knowledge in research, creative, and project activities. Contemporary art becomes more and more expressive, develops new tools, themes, and subjects of study. Based on the universal history of art and its practices and strategies, the artists create a new meaning of art, exploring and developing its language and the institutional system of art.

Introduction. 

The course includes six modules; each module consists of video lectures, text materials, additional references and sources, didactic materials, assignments, and tests. 

Module 1.

A Brief Introduction to Contemporary Art.

Modernism, Postmodernism, Metamodernism, visual codes, deconstruction, irony, pastiche, narrative, eclecticism,

contemporary art, performance art, kinetic art, installation art.

The basic chronology of contemporary art: abstract expressionism, pop-art, minimal art, neo-expressionism, performative art, etc.

Module 2: 

Abstract expressionism, color field painting, informal art, personal gesture, action painting, gestural painting, emotional expression, monochrome fields

Conceptual art, dictum, and modus, impersonal content, the meaning of context, semantics, hypertextuality, coherence

Minimal art, repetitive patterns, colors, and forms, seriality, industrial materials, materiality

Module 3: 

Pop art, Mass culture, mass consumption, and political agitation in the media, popular culture aesthetics

Performance art, Happening, specific actions, body movement, artists' body, social sculpture, action, ideas, concepts, images, 'thought forms'

Module 4: 

Video Art, visual turn, new technology, postmodern aesthetics', spatial installations, the feminist context, body, and gender in art, "global village", New media art

Soviet art, Socialist realism, Severe Style, avant-garde trends, Moscow conceptualism, Sots-Art, ideological constructs, social escapism

Module 5: 

Corporeality and the Self, mechanistic theory, Cartesian dualism, identity problems, virtual body, uncanny valley effect, symbiotic relationship, symbiotic art, body-machine mythology, and multiple identities cyborg, art and science, computer-generated imagery, augmented and virtual reality.

Module 6: 

System of Art, the institutional theory of art, cultural context, the art world, institutional critique, key stakeholders, capitalist structure of the art market, curator, biennial, art auction, multidisciplinary approach, squatting 

Each section contains:

• Video lectures

• Text materials

• Didactic materials

• Knowledge control

• Opinion exchange