ARTH 368 Studies in Contemporary Art & Architecture: Utopia/Dystopia: Art, and Aesthetic in the Neoliberal Era

• Instructor: Dr. Vanessa Parent

This course examines art and visual cultural production from the late-1970s to present-day against the backdrop of rapid financial and capital market liberalization policies known as neoliberalism. The course will consider neoliberalism as both a set of economic policies and political ideology but also as a cultural project. It will examine its global political, social and economic impacts including globalization, the cult(ure) of individualism, surveillance, environmental crisis, the rise of social and economic inequality, the corporatization of social justice movements, and the utopian aesthetics of techno-fascism. We will examine artistic practices and aesthetic tactics that respond to and seek to resist conditions set in place by neoliberal policies while expanding our inquiry beyond the so-called fine arts, investigating neoliberal ideology’s colonization of everything through an engagement with aesthetic trends, social networks, and popular culture. Taking on a global approach, this course will demand nuanced engagement with issues relating to race, class, sex and gender.