Arts & the City WNY 307

Instructor: Jean-Bernard Bucky

New York City, as the center of artistic production and consumption in the United States, provides unmatched opportunities for interrogating the place of the arts in modern society. Have technology, the market, and politics eroded the transcendent quality of the arts? The marketplace is the arena for the production and distribution of popular art. But have high art forms also been turned into commodities by market forces? How have arts activities strayed from their origins by crossing disciplinary boundaries? What is the role of the technologies of the last fifty years in supplanting, altering, or fusing with artistic creation?

New York is a unique laboratory in which to test the fundamental dichotomies embodied in the city’s artistic life: elitist/democratic, traditional/avant-garde, high art/popular art, aesthetic/political, globalized/local, film/live theatre. This course grapples with such issues in a pragmatic rather than theoretical manner. In order to confront the ideas in assigned readings, students will attend performances of theatre, opera, and dance; attend concerts; and visit museums and other cultural institutions as models for discussion and analysis. Practicing artists and entrepreneurs in the arts will meet the class in order to provoke discussion of their activities and perspectives.

Format: discussion seminar.
Requirements: full and lively participation in the seminar and its cultural activities, final oral report.