Università Roma Tre

In contemporary societies the arts affect the public discourse, becoming agency of social transformation and contributing to the creation of new cultural meanings, laboratory for the civil society, space and place for shaping the collective and public memories of controversial events, arenas where gender identities, ethnicity and social classes are socially constructed.
The first part of the course will aim at studying artistic production and politics of cultural consumption. It will focus on the following topics: theories of the "author's death", theories of reception, art as social practice, the institutional definitions of artistic value, cases of " non-recognition " and plagiarism, politics of genius, canonization and practices of social exclusion, theories of cultural capital, relationship between art and advertising, the role of social media in the production of artistic reputations and in relation to the "arts worlds", artistic intermediation processes and their social effects.
The second part will concern art institutions. It will address the following topics: activism, art and the public sphere, cancel culture, monuments in the urban space, art as memory technology, cultural consumption of the past and the role of the arts in shaping the public memory of very contested pasts, sociology of museums and politics of museum exhibition, representation of ethnic identities in museums, museums as technology of gender, multimedia arts.

1) Vera L. Zolberg, (2011) Constructing a Sociology of the Arts, Cambridge University Press, New York.
2) Anna Lisa Tota, and Trever Hagen (2016), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, (eds.), Routledge, London chapters n. 1, 2, 6, 19, 30, and 31.