ARTH 390 - Art and The Museum: Experiencing the Art Museum

• F - 12:15-14:45
• EV-1.605
• INSTRUCTOR: DR. MAYA OPPENHEIMER

‘What happens when you go to an art museum’ and ‘what does it mean to go to a museum’ are very different questions. To unpack these points, this course investigates the experience of the art museum, from how the cultural institution acts on us as visitors, art historians and artists to how we, in turn, act back upon it and participate in or resist an agenda laden with power dynamics, cultural capital and complex histories of collecting, owning and making. We will discuss contemporary art museology and the politics of the art museum in Canada using national and local examples compared with global institutions, to gain an understanding of current debates related to museum visitorship and their communities. Sessions will move on from histories of the museum to Institutional Critique and into tactics of New Museology, including decolonization initiatives. We will cover these movements, theories and emerging trends related to the experience of the art museum - from phenomenology, taste, psychogeography and standpoint theory - to also ask who is left out of art museum discourse and how efforts towards inclusivity are seeking to bridge exclusion.