The Presence of Art: Reinterpreting Modern and Contemporary Art

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Since the late nineteenth and certainly through the mid-twentieth century artists have issued avant-garde manifestoes of change, claiming their art to be ahead of the times. Critical of conventions and traditions, they regarded art as a revolutionary means to social, political, cultural, and intellectual emancipation and progress. Through what Robert Hughes has dubbed the “shock of the new,” by making tabula rasa with the existing, art was to create a better world. Were it not for the fact that art so well served the ideologies of both the socialist and fascist totalitarianisms of the last century, such radical ambitions might even sound a bit naïve, nowadays. Indeed, as yesterday’s future has become today’s past, the utopias of a bygone era seem to have been disappointed, at last - or have they not? Do we need to rescue avant-garde virtues and ideals for the sake of the relevance of contemporary art? What precisely is legacy of the modern avant-garde besides its success on the global art market? This course considers histories and theories of modern and contemporary art. It provides an overview of the heterogeneous and experimental development of modern and contemporary art. Artistic responses to society, politics, science, and technology are discussed. A further emphasis is on the practices governing institutions of the contemporary art world, such as museums and the art market. The course features a visit to the Bonnefanten museum in Maastricht, as well as a studio visit and debate with an artist in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.