In contemporary society, art plays a crucial role in shaping public discourse, becoming a “sense-making factory”, a laboratory for civil society, a space and locus of public memory, and an arena where socially constructed identities related to gender, ethnicity, and social class are defined. The course is divided into three modules. The first focuses on the study of artistic production and the politics of cultural consumption. Topics covered include theories such as the “death of the author”, reception theories, art as a social practice, institutional definitions of artistic value, cases of “non-recognition”, plagiarism policies, genius politics, canonisation, and practices of social exclusion. It also explores theories on cultural capital, the formation of artistic canons in the media society, the relationship between art and advertising, the role of social media in shaping artistic reputations and more broadly in the “worlds of art”. The module also addresses the processes of artistic intermediation and their social consequences.
The second module deals with artistic institutions and covers issues such as art and the public sphere, monuments in urban spaces, art as a technology of memory, the cultural consumption of the past, and cinema’s role in producing public memory of controversial histories. It also includes sociological models for museum analysis and the politics of museum display, the representation of ethnic identities in museums, museums as gender technologies, online museums, electronic art, and multimedia art. The third module addresses the relationship between art and sustainability, and art and social justice, focusing on forms of public art and artivism. Special emphasis is placed on memory technologies and their implications for the memories of diaspora, forced migrations, and terrorism victims. During the course, students have the opportunity to participate in the ECO-ARTS LAB: Workshop of Art and Social Sustainability, conducted in collaboration with a Roman museum.
Texts adopted for exam:
- Anna Lisa Tota and Antonietta De Feo (2019), Sociologia delle arti. Musei, memoria e performance digitali, Carocci, Roma.
- Anna Lisa Tota, Lia Luchetti and Trever Hagen (2018) (ed. by) Sociologie della memoria. Verso un’ecologia del passato, Carocci, Roma.
