GLIB 5220 -

Institution:

The New School

Subject:

Description:

Outsider Art Fall 2008. Vera Zolberg It is a cliché of current cultural criticism that traditional boundaries-between high and low art, art and politics, art and life itself-have become hopelessly blurred. When piles of bricks are placed in museums, when music is composed for performance underwater, when a few minutes of silence is called "music," the boundaries become so fluid that conventionalunderstandings of art are strained. This is manifest in the difficulties that arise among art historians, aestheticians, social scientists, and policymakers when they try to delineate what is art, what it should include or exclude, whether and how it should be evaluated, what importance to assign to art, and whether or not to support the artistic community with public funds. This class strives to understand these changes in the meaning of art in two ways. First, recent sociological theories of art are surveyed from texts by Becker, Bourdieu, Geertz, and others. These theories are then examined to illuminate a concrete empirical phenomenon, "outsider art"-that is, workcreated by "pure" amateurs (be they folk artists, madmen, hobbyists, orhomeless people), putatively unsullied by academic or commercial pressures. Our larger goal is to explore myths and realities of the socially marginal and the aesthetically pure by analyzing the role each myth plays in the ongoing transvaluation of contemporary culture. Cross listed with Sociology.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.newschool.edu

Phone Number:

(212) 229-5600

Regional Accreditation:

Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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