Artworld
Online via Zoom
Theoretical Explorations Module XXVI
2 – 27 July Mondays and Thursdays
INR 7,500 (Participation) INR 10,000 (Participation + Writing)
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM IST Worldwide Registration Open
About the Course
In the wake of readymades and conceptual art, how to tell art from what it’s not? What makes Duchamp’s Fountain art and not simply what it appears to be, a urinal? Jasper Johns’s hangers? Carl Andre’s bricks? John Cage’s silence? Photography?
The art critic Arthur Danto’s answer introduced the ‘artworld’ as an acephalous, internally contested, yet coherent community. The artworld interprets and justifies what makes art art, transforming phenomena from what they merely seem to be, represent, or replicate.
We’ll consider Danto’s artworld and its mutations from the post-war period until today. Alas, art criticism and interpretation have largely died to the conspicuous production and consumption of art and its knowledge.
We’ll try to resuscitate an art critical sensibility, considering, inter alia, Danto, Duchamps, Calvin Tomkins, Johns, Leo Steinberg, Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Mary Kelly, Stanley Cavell, TJ Clark, Rosalind Krauss, Thierry de Duve, Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Eric Santner, Lola Seaton…
About the Professor
Rohit Goel is Director/Professor of the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He is the editor of Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph 2023) and the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury 2019). Rohit has taught courses in critical theory, historiography, and politics at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. He received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria and was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD dissertation research in primary sources in Lebanon. He completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, was granted an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.
Certificate
Students will receive a Certificate of Completion upon successful attendance of the course or a Certificate of Completion and Letter of Evaluation if they successfully attend and complete the final assignment. Those who complete three courses (attendance and writing) in the Theoretical Explorations track over two calendar years are eligible for a BICAR Diploma in Theoretical Explorations.
Register
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