2025 Theses Doctoral

Culture War Formations: Globalization, Imagined Communities, and Art in the Late 20th Century

Beeson, John

This dissertation examines works related to global conceptualism that responded to culture wars between 1970 and 2000. More specifically, I reframe US art from the 1990s in terms of practices from the UK in the 1980s and the Global South in the 1970s, particularly Argentina, Senegal, and Indonesia.

My research begins from long-standing art historical questions about conceptual artists’ focus on content over form as well as their use of non-traditional art materials. Through formal analysis, social art history, interviews with artists, and new archival research, I link these qualities to the role that art plays in the contestation over and advancement of neoliberalism.