Special Topics Research Seminar (525-0-36)

Topic

Ethnographies of Cultural Production

Instructors

Claudio Ezequiel Benzecry

Meeting Info

Frances Searle Building 1483: Thurs 11:00AM - 1:50PM

Overview of class

How do elite chefs come up with new recipes? What makes blues authentic? What makes a model successful? What is the difference between art and craft? How does an amateur learn glassblowing? Why do people still flock to the opera house? How does a museum store an installation? Is there a career for hip-hop street artists? What kind of job is being a tour guide? Do record studio interns ever get a job? Why do we get the news that we get? And why should we care about all this?

This course looks at ethnographies of artistic practice to better understand how culture is made, circulated, and received in social life. Aiming to go beyond the personal idiosyncrasies of individual artists and media players, it shows through a myriad of studies in cultural production, what are the factors that play the greatest role in shaping contemporary cultural production: is it about professional traditions, forms of ownership and funding, government regulations, organizational factors or the social dynamics in the interplay between owners, workers, and audiences? Sorting out the factors that shape cultural production can best be accomplished via comparative research - across geographical regions, and institutional fields. This course offers a theoretical and methodological roadmap to such a project, helping students navigate through the landscape of how contemporary culture is produced.

The course has also a second objective, to sort out what is made visible and what remains invisible in contemporary society, as a non-reductive way to sociologically explore how power is aesthetically produced beyond categorical or representational analysis"

Class Attributes

Graduate Students Only