As we gear up for Fall term, be on the lookout for exciting goings-on with NMCC.  In the meantime, ride out the rest of your summer, but also take note of an exciting new class that is being offered in the Art History Dept which will be of great interest to some of you.

ARH 457/557: Art and/as Finance

Wednesdays, 2:00-4:20 pm
Prof. Murphy

What is art’s role within our increasingly complex
global economy? Is it just another luxury commodity,
to be bought, sold, and insured? Or can art critique,
and perhaps even disrupt, the concept of commodity
exchange itself? This seminar explores these
questions by surveying modern and contemporary
artists who explicitly use money and other financial
instruments as their medium. From Dada iconoclasts
who doctored government-issued bonds in the 1920s,
to South American conceptualists who manipulated
paper bills during the period of the region’s
dictatorships, to contemporary creators who make
digital works based on the structure of
cryptocurrency, artists have often sought to blur the
boundaries between art’s aesthetic value, its financial
value, and its material form. Tracking these artistic
blurrings, we will dive into some of the major
theorizations of modern capitalism and its alternatives
across a range of fields such as contemporary critical
theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies,
with the goal of developing conceptual tools for
analyzing the ways in which art embraces, or resists,
monetization.