|
|
|
|
MW 11:30AM-1:00, 130 Tappan Hall Special Topics:
Displaying Culture: This course examines the ways that museums shape visual culture and produce public history. We will begin by looking at the origins of museums in sixteenth-century cabinets of wonders and discuss a contemporary analogue, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. We will then consider the division of museum into distinct types and the founding of Europe’s major art museums during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A significant portion of the term will be dedicated to the analysis of local museums including the Kelsey, Natural History and Art Museum (on the University campus) and the Henry Ford Museum, the Museum of African American History, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Motown Museum (in Detroit). Class topics include: the blockbuster exhibition/"Tutmania"; the museum status of photography; the construction of art history in the Museum of Modern Art; museums as memorials; museums on the internet; strategies of museum display in the National Museum of American History; and critiques of museums leveled by contemporary artists such as Fred Wilson and the Guerilla Girls. Cost: 2 WL 2 (Alinder) |
Back to Fall 1999 Course Listings