Outside Readings

Okay guys,

We talked about essays or books that everyone will have expected you to read, but will probably never assign you to read. I am compiling them based on the textbook, whatever texts are assumed you would have encountered or read to understand the text.

I am going to upload them as PDFs, or HTML links, so you can print them at your own pace. Readings that we tend to keep using are based on how we interpret them or reuse them apart from how they are originally intended. The lack of control an author has over how their work is read, understood and taught is talked about in a 'semiotic discourse' called reader/response theory and an essay called "The Death of an Author" by Roland Barthes from a book he wrote called Image -- Music -- Text.

I have grouped this first set of readings together by subject to expand on their use today in relation to art.

Lens, Aura and the Copy (a sort of 'what-we-see' thing):
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations"

Art, Kitsch, Camp and Shit (what or how for processing what-we-see):
Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"
Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"
Georges Bataille, "The Story of the Eye"

Author, Reader and You (what-we-see is 'us and them'):
Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author"
Michel Foucault, "The Author Function"