Analysis of Artwork

Rather than teaching you to identify styles or date paintings, this course trains you to read artworks through the theoretical apparatus that has grown around them since photography disrupted what an image could mean — Barthes on signs and myth, Greenberg and Foster on the avant-garde, Bal on visual semiotics, Rosenberg on action painting. You'll work through dense primary texts week by week, sit a midterm, and build toward a presentation where you apply one critical frame to a specific work. As a senior requirement it assumes you already know the art-historical canon; the payoff is leaving with the vocabulary to argue about images instead of just describing them, which is what graduate work and serious criticism actually demand.