CULT 325 Art Theory and Practice
This course will offer students the opportunity to explore the nature and purpose of art, creativity, aesthetics, and visual communication. Students will gain an in-depth understanding of the visual language, visual elements and principles of design which will provide them with a foundation for development of critical thinking and considering art evaluation and art criticism. Understanding of the visual vocabulary and aesthetic principles will allow students to explore the broad range of artistic disciplines, media and processes, considering the media of drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, film, video, digital techniques.
CULT 406 Nation, History and Culture in Museums
This course will offer students the opportunity to embark on a fascinating investigation of the cultural significance of museums and exhibitions. The purview of the course spans from seventeenth-century innovations, the product of the first cabinets of ‘natural curiosities’ and ‘rarities’ gathered by merchants and explorers in the course of their great voyages of discovery, to the inflections of the ‘’virtual museums’’ engendered by the new media of today. The course will discern the basis for a materialist study of the museum as media-form, devoting particular attention to the communicative capacity of the museum so as to rethink assumptions about the ways in which they act as ‘’sites for the classification and ordering of knowledge, the production of ideology, and the disciplining of the public’’.
