Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0296 - Aesthetic Desire

Contemporary art, theory, and culture invite reflection on the status of aesthetic desire. Broadening and renewing aesthetics, theorists situate aesthetic desire and distaste in practices of commodification and their rhythms of novelty and obsolescence. Exploring the politics of art and culture, feminist, postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists highlight pleasures, ambivalences, and oppressive facets of aesthetic phenomena. Artists investigate the role 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. What concepts enable us to understand these forces and might help us turn them into desirable directions? Through texts by, among others, Kant, Marx, Freud, Adorno, Barthes, Bourdieu, Sarduy, Ranciere, Richard, hooks, Gilroy, Gagnier, Cheng, and Bishop, novels by Lispector and Eltit, and other cultural productions, this course examines contemporary figurations of aesthetic desire and distaste. Div. II and Div. III students only.

Writing and Research Multiple Cultural Perspectives Independent Work Students are expected to spend 7-8 hours weekly in preparation and work outside of class time.