Handbook

What defines art of the 21st century? How does one approach the art that reflects and shapes our present? This undergraduate course offers students a critical toolkit through which to engage and develop understandings of art of in the 21st century. It is thematically structured around key concepts such as ‘contemporaneity’, ‘archive’, ‘fiction’, ‘decoloniality’ and ‘global art’. Such concepts are a means to navigate and articulate some of the most significant concerns of contemporary art. But they are also essential for articulating contemporary art’s entanglement with a broad range of interconnected political, social, economic and ecological phenomena. Art’s complex and interdisciplinary relationship to the present will be examined through a series of case studies and art historical/theoretical texts. The course, and the resources it engages, will develop undergraduate students' analytical capacities and research skills, while building their vocabulary of key concepts central to contemporary art discourse.