DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE GREAT ARTIST in Spring 2021 (AH1099FB2)

"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" asked, with some irony, art historian Linda Nochlin in a seminal 1971 essay. Part of the answer, she replied, lies in in a common misconception of what art is: the naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience —a translation of personal life into visual terms. The class will rely on an extensive selection of films (old and new, mainstream, documentary and experimental ones) to examine both the cultural construction and perpetuation of the myth of the “Great” artist and its rebuttal.