1. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice

JF Martel opens the syllabus with an engaging, fun, insightful, and accessible essay/critique/call to action revolving around a particularly contemporary framing of art (and what is “not-art”, i.e. artifice). While Martel isn’t exactly in the lineage of critical theorist squarely, his work opens the conversation by providing a shared lexicon of terms and phenomena that will remain useful throughout the rest of the syllabus.