Terra Foundation Lectures in American Art 2019 - A Contest of Images: American Art as Culture War (2) The Body of Emmett Till

Dr John Blakinger speaks about the controversy surrounding Dana Shutz's painting of the body of Emmett Till exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennnial. Who has the right to see in an age of image overload? At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a painting by the artist Dana Schutz depicting the body of Emmett Till, a fifteen-year-old African-American boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955, incited outrage. The artists Hannah Black and Parker Bright condemned the work as "black death spectacle." The episode resuscitated debates over the use and abuse of traumatic pictures, and the way visual images propelling the Civil Rights movement also exploited their subjects. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

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History of Art at the University of Oxford draws on a long and deep tradition of teaching and studying the subject. The core academic staff of the History of Art Department work on subjects from medieval European architecture to modern Chinese art. Over fifty associated academic staff (e.g. in Anthropology, Classics, History, Oriental Studies, and the Ruskin School of Drawing) include teachers and researchers across the full global and historical range of art and visual culture. This offers students exciting possibilities to take courses and receive supervision on a very wide range of topics, and to develop their own interests in art history.