teaching philosophy

I look at visual culture (images and image production) as an arena in which contending social interests negotiate power relations through acceptance of or resistance to conventions of signification. I use the words "visual culture" and "image" rather than "art" because, in the field of twentieth-century U.S. art history, traditional categories no longer have much application. Eighty years ago, Marcel Duchamp's notorious Fountain proved that any definition of art resides not in the object but in the historically-specific and power-laden discourses that designate that object as "art." Thus, for example, photography and so-called outsider art, which were not considered legitimate art forms a century ago, have now become the subject of many museum exhibitions; and ephemeral, computer-generated virtual images "captured" by means of digitized processes fill the pages of contemporary art magazines and catalogues, themselves existing both in the physical world and the virtual spaces of the Internet. My focus, then, while always image-based, and thus amenable to the same tools of visual analysis that traditional art historians use, extends to consider the social construction of cultural value, the history of hegemonic formations, the material investments (time, training, and capital) required for the production and consumption of cultural forms, and the social construction of identity (subjectivity).

Instructional Areas:
U.S. Art and Critical Theory, Colonial to Contemporary
History and Criticism of Women's Art
History and Criticism of Photography and Film
Methods

HOME / ABOUT ME / TEACHING PHILOSOPHY/
CONTACT ME / DEPARTMENT HOME PAGE / FSU HOME PAGE

website contents and graphics copyrighted by Karen A. Bearor