Instructor:
Thomas Stanley
tstanle1@gmu.edu

This is a course about how we talk about art. It encompasses serious criticism of contemporary art and theoretical discussions of the ideas that explain and inform the production and reception of art. Seen through a variety of theoretical lenses, artistic activity will be seen as an active agent in the formation of social, cultural, economic, and political meaning.

In this course, we will learn how to read theoretical statements about art, society, and the individual and to make sense of them in their intellectual, historical, and phenomenological context. We will explore artistic practice as a way of making theory – as a means by which artists explore the problems of our day in the idiom of the visual. We will see how visual and written statements expand and explain each other and we will see how the arenas in which ideas about art are discussed impact the form and content of that discussion. The doing of art will thereby seen as much less about making objects or self expression than about conducting research and “publishing” its results.