Our lives are bound by material conditions and social factors which put limits on our experience. Generally speaking, we remain unaware of those limits until circumstances contrive to press us against them in some way. Only then do we become conscious of what can and cannot happen, what we can and cannot do. We react to those limitations accordingly. From time to time, we may even transcend them.

This situation is what art exposes and helps us understand. In many ways, artists locate the edges and limits of experience. In this function as navigator, map maker and surveyor, the artist can be quite expansive and her work quite philosophical in nature. That zone of knowledge where art overlaps with our general understanding of reality is what Critical Theory is about. We are placing art within a larger context: the history of ideas and the history of consciousness. That history is what the critical theorist tries to articulate.

In this class, our focus will be on developments in the 20th Century. We will consider the general theories put forth by philosophers, social scientists and cultural commentators. We will look directly at films, fiction, plays, and poetry as well as visual art to see how it fits into that intellectual context, and we will consider closely the musings of art critics themselves on the subject. The approach will be chronological, but our chronologies will be contained by three major themes with which everyone (theorist, art critic, artist and layperson) is intimately involved.