The Altes Museum (German for Old Museum), one of several internationally renowned museums on Museum Island in Berlin, Germany. The sign reads "All Art has been contemporary". (Photo courtesy of GALERIEopWEG on Flickr.)
Instructor(s)
Prof. Noel Jackson
MIT Course Number
21L.325
As Taught In
Fall 2010
Level
Undergraduate
Course Description
Course Description
The "small wonders" to which our course will attend are moments of present time, depicted in the verbal and visual media of the modern age: newspapers, novels and stories, poems, photographs, films, etc. We will move between visual and verbal media across a considerable span of time, from eighteenth-century poetry and prose fiction to twenty-first century social networking and microblogging sites, and from sculpture to photography, film, and digital visual media. With help from philosophers, contemporary cultural historians, and others, we will begin to think about a media practice largely taken for granted in our own moment.
Other Versions
Other OCW Versions
OCW has published multiple versions of this subject. 