Teaching Contemporary Art to Undergraduates

design by Camille Ten Horn

I have wrapped up teaching "Art, Money and Labor in Art and Art Criticism from 1830 to Today” (ARTH 290-02/ ECON 390-02 Special Topics) for summer session 1 at Duke. The aim of the course was to explore how the contradiction between artistic ethics and monetary value has been expressed in art criticism and studio practice from the nineteenth century onwards, integrated as it was into polemical writings and the theoretical percepts of artistic production. Topics covered in this course included debates over art and craft, representations of artistic and non-artistic labor, avant-garde critiques of the art object, institutional critique, the “art market critique,” relational aesthetics and affective labor, conceptual and non-commercial art works, and 'net art.' Readings were culled from historical as well as contemporary sources, including the writings of Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, John Ruskin, Guy de Bord, Lucy Lippard, Boris Groys, Claire Bishop, and Claire Fontaine.

Though every teaching experience is a learning experience, during this course I learned two important things.

1. The first is to trust your students. Though I had originally conceived of this course as an advanced-level seminar, I had to lessen the reading load when I saw that few of my enrolled students had taken an art history class before. To do this while still providing a rigorous course load was hard, l but I decided to give my students the credit they deserved and kept the tough stuff in to see how they would deal with it. It sounds intuitive, but this was made easier by devoting the beginning of the course and to a very select group of theorists and key concepts: Kant, Marx, Benjamin, and historical narratives of art history given by Peter Bürger. Spending a generous amount of class time on crucial themes and key terms helped pave the way for understanding, and by the end of the course students felt comfortable with terms like "autonomy" and "labor theory of value" which, we all know, are ubiquitous in contemporary art readings.

2. My course was originally intended to be a  "special topics" course focused on critiques of commodity capitalism in the arts, but I quickly discovered that the class functioned just as well as an introduction to the history of modern and contemporary art, that is, that one can provide a very compelling narrative of modern and contemporary art through this single thread of inquiry.