Course Specifics: Compulsory/ Gateway course for students pursuing ASP Capstone thesis or MLS Thesis in Visual Arts.
Prerequisites: The course is restricted to students pursuing ASP Capstone thesis or MLS Thesis in Visual Arts.
Course Description
This course introduces theories and methods of art history that have played a major role in its intellectual and professional formation of the discipline. From the pre-disciplinary cusp of Vasari and artistic biography in the Renaissance, the course will explore the origins of art historical scholarship in the eighteenth century, and then touch on a wide range of subsequent approaches, including Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial interpretations of art. The course approaches the discipline of art history as an archival mediated site of cultural critique and construction. Special attention will be given to the adequacy of established art-historical paradigms of formal, stylistic, and iconographic analysis in dealing with the “expanded field” of visual studies and image theory today. In addition, some consideration will be given to the professional structure of art history and visual studies as an increasingly “globalized” mode of inquiry.
sraman.mukherjee@ashoka.edu.in