This course is a series of lectures surveying the last fifty years of art. Team-taught among four CCA faculty members, each class consists of a one-and-a-half hour lecture, followed by a smaller, hour-long discussion section. Both art historical and discursive in nature, this course will offer both a body of shared knowledge and a common language for talking about recently-historical and contemporary art. Assuming a chronological structure, the class is broken into units, each of which will feature three different 'takes' on a single decade, tracking developments in global art from the 1960s to today. This framework also allows us to make the most of the course's polyvocal structure, as different artists, ideas, places, and notions of history are brought to bear within a consistent organization over the semester's duration. With a special emphasis on providing a diverse introduction as well as a firm groundwork for the kind of rigorous thinking that will be expected of your time in graduate school at CCA, this course will present an array of ideas, artists, artworks, and theoretical frameworks with particular focus on how works respond to- or are engaged with their social, political, and cultural contexts.