Università Roma Tre

In the artistic landscape of the twentieth century the comic passes through the age of avant-garde reaching the postmodern threshold as a constant presence. The grotesque, the hilarious, the irony, the entire register of its possibilities defines from time to time different rewritings of the aesthetic canon. Comic or ironic gestures and words become subversive or iconoclastic forces that pushes towards the rethinking of the social role of the artist, the relevance of his/her work, its autonomy and relationship with the historical, social, political spheres.

Exams

The final exam consists of a written test, and requires a capacity for critical exposition of the course topics as well as a general knowledge of the visual arts from 1960 to 2000. Students who regularly attend classes only are required to submit a paper at least 10 days in advance of the exam (minimum length 18,000 signs). Updates and more information on http://artedams.blogspot.it/

• The Artist’s Joke, edited by Jennifer Higgie, Whitechapel/MIT
• Stefano Chiodi, Il ridicolo sublime, in Encicolopedia delle arti contemporanee. I portatori del tempo, I: Il tempo comico, a cura di Achille Bonito Oliva, Electa, Milano 2010, pp. 138-79.
• Sigmund Freud, Il motto di spirito, Bollati Boringhieri
• The Artist’s Joke, a cura di Jennifer Higgie, Whitechapel/MIT

Textbook

• Hal Foster et al., Arte since 1900, Thames and Hudson.

Further texts will be listed during the course.