This module offers students an overview of the most significant and paradigmatic artistic transformations in Europe and North America from the 1980s to the present. Students will have the opportunity to closely examine a wide range of artists, projects, and institutional ruptures that will inform our debates on the distinctions between modern, postmodern, contemporary and new media art.

We will be submerged into the world of contemporary art, a world full of paradoxes, contradictions and controversies. What is the spirit of contemporary art? Does it have one? What have been the most significant changes in the relationship between the contemporary artist and the art institution? Have the three market booms since the 1980s had an impact on the production, reception, and dissemination of contemporary art? How has the biennial impacted our understanding of the local and the global? What can confessional artworks tell us about our conceptions of the public and the private? We will also open up space for speculation and debate: has artistic production exhausted itself? Is there art beyond contemporary art? If there is, what would it look like?