Mass Culture

4.602 Modern Art and Mass Culture
Spring 2004

President Jimmy Carter receives a portrait from the artist Andy Warhol. (Image courtesy of the US National Archives and Records Administration.)
Course Highlights
This class contains a complete set of lecture notes, along with descriptions of the paper topics in the assignments section.
Course Description
This class provides an introduction to modern art and theories of modernism and postmodernism. It focuses on the way artists use the tension between fine art and mass culture to mobilize a critique of both. We will examine objects of visual art including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and video. These objects will be viewed in their interaction with advertising, caricature, comics, graffiti, television, fashion, folk art, and so-called "primitive" art.

Syllabus
General Information
This subject introduces undergraduate students to the history of modern art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, in Europe and the USA. Through lectures and recitations, we will examine the interaction between high art and mass culture, and assess the role of both in forming the modernist aesthetic. Modernism became a conscious program and strategy more than a century ago. We will follow that strategy through its checkered past, assess its effectiveness over the last 150 years, and conclude with the uneasy cultural politics of our current century's emerging art.

How does art produce, reflect, exaggerate, or ameliorate effects of modernization, such as urbanization, industrialization, global capitalism, or mass politics? Is culture generated by elites, or by anonymous energies bubbling up from below? What is the relationship between art and visual technologies such as photography, cinema, television, and the digital media, each of which emerged at a specific historical moment to challenge the complacency of high art? And finally, which theories of cultural production remain useful for thinking about such issues today?

Mass culture, for the purposes of this course, is broadly defined. The very concept emerges from within modernism, and is not always seen in negative terms. In the positive sense, it is culture that belongs to "the masses" rather than to an elite, generated for the people (at all educational and economic levels) rather than the church, the king, or the aristocracy. More negatively viewed, it is ersatz culture, copied and predigested, a phony replacement for "popular" or "folk" art. Inescapably, it is a product of modern technologies: mass culture arises when visual forms can be widely replicated, broadly distributed, and easily "consumed." Mass culture is supposedly a leveler and globalizer - by definition, we all share mass cultural references. At the same time, it can be understood as the primary mechanism by which "rarity" or "otherness" from the periphery of the developed world becomes newly available for cultural appropriation (via "primitivism" and commodification). There is nothing static about mass culture; from primitivism to postmodernism, mass culture has played an enormous role in visual art. Modern artists and theorists, in turn, have given us new ways to think about popular culture and harness its force.

The lectures begin in 19th century France, with art by Courbet, Manet, Degas, and the Impressionists, examining the impact of popular woodcuts, lithographic posters, and the new technique of photography in "the painting of modern life." The rise of urban leisure and commercial entertainment in Paris will be discussed in the work of Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec. Next, the turn away from urbanism toward so-called "primitive" cultures will be reviewed in the work of Van Gogh and Gauguin, asking how other peoples and their art become available through travel, postcards, the marketing of exotic foods, and other aspects of European colonial culture. Then, we will turn to twentieth-century anxieties about a popularized machine culture, as evinced by restless new movements such as Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. The new approaches to form these modern artists pursued - collage, ready-mades, photomontage, and assemblage - will be examined along with the contemporaneous disciplines of semiotics and psychoanalysis that helped explain them. Subsequent lectures will evaluate the position of art in relation to mass production, consumer culture, and dramatic political change in four decisive moments: Post-Revolutionary Russia (1920s), Weimar and Fascist Germany (1920s and 1930s), the Great Depression and World War (1930s and 1940s), and International Pop Art (1950s-'60s). The semester will conclude with a series of lectures on postmodernism and recent art, examining works that critique the intersecting mass formations of femininity and masculinity, the marketed author, and the culture industry of the museum.

The art and theory of modernism, and its dialectical partnership with mass culture, are challenging and unconventional subjects - as one might expect given the dramatic changes in human technologies of representation, reproduction, and mass production during the past 150 years. We will reconstruct the historical density of these situations, but allow the argument, provocation, and difficulty of the art and issues to remain. No prior or specialized knowledge of either art or mass culture is assumed. On the contrary, the point is to see art as a vital and unpredictable part of everyday life, particularly in its engagement with the mass culture that is thought to affect us all.

Requirements

To fulfill the requirements for this subject, you will be expected to attend lectures and recitations, do a good bit of outside reading and looking, view occasional films during class (see syllabus for precise dates), and attend scheduled field trips. In keeping with HASS-D requirements, you must also write four papers (as outlined below), and take a final exam. There are opportunities for different learning styles in coming to terms with this sometimes challenging material.

There is no single text for the course, but 3 books with required readings are recommended for purchase and are itemized in the readings section. Additional readings from books, journals, and even unpublished materials are assigned or recommended, as specified in the readings section.

1. Required assignments (dates on calendar) and grade percentage.

2. Optional but highly recommended (dates on calendar):

Field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to examine Gauguin painting.

3. Grades

Grades will be determined as follows:

ACTIVITIES PERCENTAGES
Midterm (which includes the five-page paper) 20%
Two Other Papers (10% each) 20%
Research Paper 25%
Final Exam 35%


Extra credit will be given for completed peer reviews and participation in recitations. Note: You must complete all assignments in order to receive a grade for the course.

4. Policy on Academic Honesty

Discussion, debate, and credited collaboration with other students (in the form of peer reviews or joint presentations) are encouraged, and will enhance your understanding of the subject. However, any written essays that include material paraphrased without footnotes to the original source, phrases quoted without quotation marks, information or interpretations taken from any source (including web sites) without proper citation, or work otherwise completed by others and presented as your own, will be considered a violation of academic honesty and will be referred to the appropriate Institute committees for disciplinary action. If you have any questions about plagiarism or the Institute policy regarding academic honesty, please consult your TA.