Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0299 - Aesthetic Desire and Distaste

Contemporary art, theory, and culture invite reflection on the status of aesthetic desire. Returning to the aesthetic and departing from autonomy theory, writers on material culture situate aesthetic desire and abjection in practices of commodity consumption and production and their dynamics of novelty and obsolescence. Accounts of the politics of art and culture by feminist, postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists point not only to the pleasures, ambivalences, and oppressive dimensions of aesthetic dispositions, but also to the uncanny conversions they wreak. Artists and media producers reveal the participation of aesthetic desire in a neoliberal, racial and gendered division of labor and in transnational flows of images that reconfigure space and time, memory and futurity. Through texts by, among others, Freud, Adorno, Barthes, hooks, Bhabha, Rancire, Richard, and Groys, a novel by Eltit, and other cultural productions, this course examines contemporary figurations of aesthetic desire and distaste.

Independent Work Multiple Cultural Perspectives Writing and Research Prerequisites: two previous theory courses.