ARTH 390 Art and the Museum: Contexts and Strategies for the Contemporary Art Museum

• Mondays, 11:45am-2:15pm
• Online: Access through Moodle
• Instructor: Dr. John Di Stefano

In recent decades, art museums around the world have been reinventing themselves within quickly changing cultural, social and economic contexts. The course examines the development, roles, and significance of the art museum in contemporary society, and consequently how it shapes our public culture. What relationship does the art museum have with artists, audiences, institutions, and its communities? What strategies have art museums developed to respond to the changes posed by internal and external forces? Using writings and exemplars by historians, theorists, curators and artists, this course will examine key aspects of the art museum in today’s society from various points of view. We will cover traditional subjects, such as display, buildings, artefacts and collecting, and more recent issues facing the museum such as globalization, commerce, community and experimental exhibition forms. We will address the changing roles and responsibilities of art museums as knowledge-based, social institutions, and trends in thinking and practice including: the tradition of artists’ institutional critique, new forms of curating, and the challenge of curating contemporaneity itself.