Class 1 - Contemporary Art - The Counterculture in the Golden Years

Conceptual Introduction: Modernism, Postmodernism and Contemporary Art

New Directions: The Counterculture, Duchamp and the New Generation of American Artists

Robert Rauschenberg: Pioneer of Contemporary Art and Forerunner of Conceptual Art

Jasper Johns: Pioneer of Contemporary Art and Forerunner of Pop Art  

Class 2 - Pop Art: The new figuration in the age of consumption

USA, 1960s: Pop Art and the American Way of Life: eroticization, trivialization and excess

“This is Tomorrow”: the emergence of Pop in England in the late 1950s

USA 60's: Pop Art and the American Way of Life: Eroticization, Banalization and Excess

Roy Lichtenstein: Expanding the Duchampian ready-made  

Class 3 - Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme: Grammar and Sociology of the Object  

Pop Painting: James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselman

From Painting to Pop Sculpture: Robert Indiana and Claes Oldenburg

Nouveau Réalisme: the new perception of the real

From mundane reality to nirvana: Martial Raysse and Yves Klein  

Lesson 4 - The Death of the Real: From Photorealism to Hyperrealism

Photorealism in Germany: the painting of Gerhard Richter

Chuck Close and Hyperrealism in the USA

Other American hyperrealists: Photography and simulacrum in the “society of the spectacle”

The reinvention of Hyperrealism in the art of the last decades  

Class 5 - Minimal Art - Minimalism and the poetics of exclusion

Hard-Edge Abstraction: “Precise Boundary Abstraction” or Pre-Minimalism

Minimal Art: Abstraction, literalism and the search for minimal expression

Top minimalists: LeWitt, Judd, Flavin, Andre and Morris

Other minimalists (Agnes Martin, Fred Sandback and Robert Irwin)  

Class 6 - Conceptual Art: “Art after philosophy”

Conceptual Art: art, philosophy, language and the Duchampian legacy

Analytical and tautological propositions (Art and Philosophy, Art and Language)

Beyond the “white cube”: Land Art (art, nature and ecology)

From the natural landscape to the “white cube”: Land Art, Earth Art or Earthworks  

Class 7 - Conceptual Art II: “When attitudes become form”

Fluxus, happenings, actions and collectivity in the art of the 1960s/70s

Performance Art: Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Gilbert & George, etc.

Art and radicalism: Feminism and Body Art

Art, love and life: Marina Abramovic & Ulay  

Class 8 - Neo-expressionist painting in Europe and the USA

The “New Savages” in Germany and the worldwide revival of painting in the 1980s

Anselm Kiefer: Art as History, Tragedy and Redemption

The Italian Transvanguard (Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, etc.)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and American Graffiti  

Class 9 - “After the end of art”: Post-Modernism of the 1980s

Postmodern theories: “post-production” (Nicolas Bourriaud), death of the author (Barthes), of originality (Rosalind Krauss) and of the real (Baudrillard)

Exhaustion: re-production, re-reading, citation and palinody

Jeff Koons: anti-aestheticism, simulacrum, trivialization and market criticism

Dissolution of “movements”, “transfiguration of the banal” and the “end of art” (Arthur Danto)  

Class 10 - The identity crisis and other contemporary debates

Identity, otherness and sexuality: the art of Louise Bourgeois

Christian Boltanski: memory, fragmentation and ruins

The Art of Minorities: Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin and Felix Gonzalez Torres

The Feminism of Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and the Guerrilla Girls  

Class 11 - Installation and Site Specific: the “expanded field” of sculpture

From sculpture to installation and site specific: the evolution of three-dimensional art

Anish Kapoor: from materiality to sculptural monumentality

The critical potential of irony: Maurizio Cattelan and the new sculpture

Diversity and multiplicity of discourses: the “expanded field” of the end of the millennium  

Class 12 - From Postmodernism to Globalization: the new cultural landscape

Advertising, money and power: YBA (Young British Artists), the new British art

Damien Hirst and the redefinition of the contemporary artist's status

Multiculturalism and Geopolitics: the “invasion” of Chinese art in the West

Provisional conclusions and notes for 21st century art