ARTH 6100 - Proseminar

Spring. 4 credits.

Co-meets with ARTH 4100/VISST 4200. Undergraduates should enroll in the 4000-level course. Limited enrollment.

M. Pham.

Works of art have always engendered political, social, and cultural meanings. This seminar introduces the methods that art historians have engaged in, studying the objects and ideas that constitute the historiography of their discipline. Challenged and enlarged by cultural debates over issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender, the field of art history is expanding to incorporate problems of assessing quality of intention and reception along with authorship, of artistic production in place of artistic creation, and of Western-oriented attitudes to race in reference to orientalism and colonialism. Readings focus on historically situating methods and the implications of their cross-cultural application. Papers encourage students to put methods into practice, realizing in the process that subject matter is not an isolated choice to which methods are applied, but something that profoundly affects the approach the researcher brings to the writing of art history. Students are required to attend the Visual Culture Colloquium held on most Mondays at 5 p.m.