Art and Culture - Contemporary Art History

Overview

The Art and Culture - Contemporary Art History MA programme at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam focuses on the visual, process-based, and digital art since the 1960s. This specialization trains you as an art historian who is equipped to tackle this complex but fascinating field. After completing this programme, you will have a solid knowledge of today’s visual, process-based, and digital art. You will also be equipped with skills to do research, present, and write about today's art, enabling you to pursue a career in the cultural sector (museums, festivals, art galleries, archives), as art critic, or freelance cultural entrepreneur.

Today’s art includes installation art and site-specific projects, digital or new media art (interactive installations, locative media works, software art, networked art, electronic art and video art), performative and activist projects and artistic research.

What unites these art forms is that they directly address the complexity of today’s society, within which information technologies and globalization play an ever-increasing role, leading to networked forms of artistic practice that transgress national and cultural borders. At the same time, artists are very aware of the heritage they build upon, deconstruct, commenting on, or appropriating art history, leading to various attempts to describe contemporary art with terms such as post-modern, post-conceptual, post-medium, and more recently even post-internet and post-digital – and post-contemporary.

Study Programme

• You will kick off your first semester by self-critically questioning your role as an art historian with a specific interest in contemporary art by following a class on ‘Methods and Theories of Art History’ in the first period. 

• Parallel to this, you will follow a research seminar dedicated to a specific topic within contemporary art, in order to immediately get started in developing your knowledge of the field and to improve your research and writing skills. 

• While this class continues in the second period, the second period will also allow you to delve into the depth of digital and process-based art while following a class specifically dedicated to new media art.

Promotion alumni sessions Master’s day

During the Master’s day, you can also meet our (international) alumni during several workshops. In these sessions they will tell you more about career opportunities after finishing your Master’s degree.