Programme

In contemporary societies the arts affect the public discourse, becoming agency of meanings, laboratory for the civil society, space and place for shaping the public memory of controversial events, arena where gender identities, ethnicity and social classes are socially constructed.
The first part of the course will aim at studying artistic production and politics of cultural consumption. It will focus on the following topics: theories of the author's death, theories of reception, art as social practice, the institutional definition of artistic value, cases of " non-recognition " and plagiarism, politics of genius, canonization and practices of social exclusion, theories of cultural capital, relationship between art and advertising, the role of social media in the production of artistic reputations and in relation to the "arts worlds".
The second part will concern art institutions. It will address the following topics: art and the public sphere, monuments in the urban space, art as memory technology, cultural consumption of the past and the role of the cinema in shaping the public memory of very contested pasts, sociology of museums and politics of museum exhibition, representation of ethnic identities in museums, museums as technology of gender, multimedia arts.

Core Documentation

1) Anna Lisa Tota e Antonietta De Feo (2019), Sociologia delle arti. Musei, memoria e performance digitali, Carocci, Roma.
2) Anna Lisa Tota, Lia Luchetti e Trever Hagen (2018) (a cura di) Sociologie della memoria. Verso un’ecologia del passato, Carocci, Roma.

Type of delivery of the course

The course will be based on: 1) traditional teaching; 2) a workshop that will consist of an ethnographical observation in a museum located in Rome. In the case of an extension of the health emergency due to COVID-19, all the provisions regulating the teaching activities and the students' assessments will be implemented. In particular, the following methods will be applied: the lessons will be carried out interactively on the Microsoft Teams platform and the teaching materials will be made available to the students on the Moodle platform. The workshop will be carried out on an online museum.

Type of evaluation

The exam will be written and it will last two hours. The students will be asked to reply extensively to three questions. Moreover the students will have the possibility (but this additional part is not mandatory) to take part during the course to a workshop that will consist of: 1) an ethnographical observation in a museum located in Rome and 2) the presentation of the obtained results during the class through a powerpoint presentation realized by the students in groups. This additional work will be evaluated with a mark. In the case of an extension of the health emergency due to COVID-19, all the provisions regulating the teaching activities and the students' assessments will be implemented. In particular, the exam will consist of a written paper (25 pages) on a topic related to the course and to be approved by the professor. Moreover, the workshop will be held on a museum on line.