Course Details

1. Define the sense of an artist today and the mapping of the artist in the professional sphere.
2. Identify the importance of visual research and reading in illustrating as well as interpreting contemporary art theory and practise.
3. Use analysis and synthesis to develop critical thinking and provide criticism that will allow further experimentation and questioning for new knowledge.
4. Appraise the overlap between conceptualisation and critical thinking in relation to art today.
5. Create an understanding of the historical development of postmodernism.
6. Formulate critical and theoretical points of view for the art periods of the 50s and 60s till present.

Introduction to concepts, and issues such as the artist in society, caricature and the grotesque, realism, women in art, erotic art, art and politics, naive imagery, and popular arts and culture.

Introduction to the Art of the Fifties, the influence of the Cold War, the heightened consumerism, and the explosion of mass media as a contextual backdrop

Introduction to the New York School and its relationship to post-war ideology; the second generation of Abstract Expressionism and contemporary landscape painting; the rise of an antithetical aesthetic in the art of Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Jasper Johns; the new radicalism as found in the Beat scene, happenings, and underground films.

Introduction to the Art of the Sixties. Art and related cultural phenomena of the 1960s. Core material happenings and assemblage, Pop Art, Colour Field, Minimalism, New Technologies and "dematerializing" tendencies of the later part of the decade.

Introduction to the Art of the Seventies and of the Eighties; currents and concepts in contemporary art, with emphasis on women artists during the 1980s, and the European contribution to contemporary art.

Introduction to the Art of the Nineties and  the establishment of London as the world Art Centre and the complete picture of British Art in that decade as an examination of what art is and what it can say.

Introduction to Minimal and Conceptual Art, Neo-Dada, Arte Povera and Installation.

Introduction to New Media and New Technologies as well as Feminist, Racial and Gay Art.

Issues of Curating. The curatorial in Contemporary Art.

Mapping the 21^st Century. The Social, the Political, the Ethnic and the Economic. Introduction to issues of identity and memory. 

• Foster, H., Krauss, R., Bois, Y., Bucloh, B., Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, London, Thames & Hudson, 2004
• Leunq, S., Kocur, Z., Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, London, Blackwell, 2005.

The taught part of course is delivered to the students by means of illustrated lectures, conducted with the help of computer presentations. Students’ museum, exhibition and gallery visits are also performed. Illustrated lectures

Oral and written exercises, personal historical research, art essay writing, critical discussions and group critiques complement the course.