WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2020-2021       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
"Public Freehold": Collective Strategies and the Commons in Art Since 1960
ARHA 249
Spring 2021 not offered

Art since 1960 has forged a contradictory alliance between the legal field of intellectual property and the expanded tradition of poststructural thought. Taking its title from conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, this course navigates that contradiction via four units, each corresponding to a specific artistic strategy: appropriation, scoring, collaboration, and participation. Testing the limits of the signable, saleable, and stealable, such techniques have thrown traditional concepts of originality and possessive individualism into arrears while giving rise, quite paradoxically, to some of the most celebrated careers and widely reported lawsuits involving allegations of creative property theft. Do such maneuvers amount to specious self-aggrandizement? Or do they indicate a renewed search to locate, foment, and protect sources of creative invention? The ever-expanding horizon of collaborative media access and increased pressures to enclose this new electronic commons have made such questions all the more urgent today.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA CHUM
Course Format: DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (ARHA-MN)(ARHA)(ARST)

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459