This seminar deals with contemporary artistic production, the global circulation of artworks and the practices of display in museums or galleries but also in public spaces. Exploring key concepts and approaches within the discipline of anthropology, we will elaborate on questions such as the flows of art works on a global scale, the tensions and power relations between artists, art experts, and art markets or cultural management and how we can investigate these from an anthropological perspective.
What do we make of emerging – and declining – ‘trends’ such as African, Latin American, Australian, Chinese or Indian contemporary art? In which way can we discuss and analyze the production and circulation of different kind of art genres (e.g. street art, fine art, ethnic art) and cultural origin within a social (global) field?
In order to apply major theories and methods within the Anthropology of Art, this course will give students the possibility to analyze and work with images more practically: students will work in single or collaborative projects on research material (provided by young scholars) in image-data bases not only to collect and archive images but also to add metadata and comment (cross-tagging) on artworks.
The seminar will be conducted in parts as an elearning course (moodle) as well as a joint teaching course with a student-workshop and invited junior researchers who provided their research material on graffiti, contemporary art or wall paintings to the students for further studies. Therefore it included first hand experiences in working with images databases and image annotation.
Cathrine Bublatzky 