Art Meets Socienty, Society Meets Art

The link between art and society has been discussed through diverse and contrasting approaches. Art and artistic quality have been defined as the product of a complex institutional configuration operating through experts and authorities independently of any necessary and fixed qualities or characteristics inherent to the work. Art and the nature of art have been defined as the product of processes of socialization (learning and initiation) that make it possible to identify an object as a work of art and reveal its supposedly hidden significance and meaning. Art has been defined as a means for instigating a systematic institutional critique of the modes of production and representation of the artistic object and sphere while exposing hidden structures, dominant forces, foundational narratives, social categorizations and classifications, and silenced voices. In other contexts, art has been defined as a form of encounter, convergence, and debating that functions as a site of mental and practical potential that touches on ideas and conceptions rooted outside distinctly artistic contexts (for example: society, politics, ecology and so on) and conventional “logical”, “objective” and “linear” patterns of inquiry. The course is dedicated to these various perspectives on the interrelations between art and society as well as on the socio-historical

conditions that structured the relations between art and society, and to the effect of the art-society linkage on art and society.