ANTH 041D. Art, Money, Power

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, a massive international network of public and private institutions, commercial art galleries, annual art fairs and plurennial mega-exhibitions had become firmly entrenched as a new global infrastructure through which art works, artists, professional curators, and art collectors now roam. How did this international art system come to be? How does it serve both to authorize and to constrain the kinds of practices that can assume the label of “contemporary art”? In this course we will take an historical and cross-cultural approach to understanding the multiple, dynamic relationships between art, money, and power, asking how different sociocultural modes of accumulating wealth have facilitated the development of different artistic practices, and how these in turn have both challenged and reproduced existing arrangements of power relations. Our case studies will come from cultural anthropology, art history and monetary history, and we will practice interpreting artworks through the lens of critical theories of power.
Social sciences.
1 credit.
Catalog chapter: Sociology and Anthropology
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/sociology-anthropology

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