Courses
VART3337 The Anthropology of Art (3 units)
- Prerequisite:
- VART2305 Art in the 20th Century I
- Medium of Instruction:
- English
This course introduces the study of visual anthropology, examining the visual documentation of humanity and its cultures. Exploring a variety of media objects and events, this course critically engages students into debates and issues related to photography, advertising, global mass media, material culture and the impact of new technologies.
The visual interpretation offers significant insight into our understanding of the human development in terms of our own identities, and within the wider global and historical contexts. Fragile, and often temporarily specific, the analyses of visual elements offer an intellectual platform for contextualization and decontextualization.
Exploring concepts and methods as research tools for anthropological inquiry that consider the inter-connection of reality, social perspectives, and the resulting visuality, which can help to inform and influence our ways of understanding and assimilating our lives and societies.
Through the discussions of what images mean to us, and their effects, the course will further poses crucial questions surrounding our understanding within the historical, cultural and social, value and power of vision, image and artefact. Emphasising and contextualizing the relations between people and the visual as objects, studied both within and external to, environmental and cultural context, this course will guide students to integrate various points of view and develop their own critical judgment of the Visual Arts.