This course aims to provide students with an analytical sense of the art market, its current players and operational mechanisms and strategies, as well as providing competent knowledge about the origins and theories of money, the nature of exchange, and how money and themes of exchange are manipulated by artists for aesthetic and ideological purposes. The course is primarily a philosophical investigation into value and ideology: using art and the art-market as a case-study. Focus in the latter half of the course will be directed toward marketing and computational modes of art-exchange (branding, collecting, memes, fairs, crowd-sourcing, appropriation, networked portfolios, crypto-currencies). By the end of the semester students should be able to identify and analyze the motivation and interests of the international and local art market, and to critique art that operates within and outside of the art-market. Emphasis will be placed on situating the artwork in social, economic and discourse practices. Attention will be distributed across traditional, conceptual, new-media, engaged, archival, participatory, virtual and computational art.

Coursework: 100%