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This co-taught graduate seminar explores two interconnected concepts of decadence across a wide range of artistic works and art historical contexts, pivoting around the fin-de-siècle to span the pre-modern to the contemporary. Decadence names, on the one hand, a cultural or historical condition summed up in the cliché of “decline and fall”: civilization stagnates, consumption turns obsessive, vulgarity subsumes aesthetic taste, and politics turn regressive in an irreversible slide toward ruin. Decadence in this sense is a term of radical negativity. On the other hand, as a mode of symbolic behavior, decadence is surprisingly ambivalent. It describes both the over-consumption associated with ruling elites and forms of popular festivity, such as masquerade and carnival, that license promiscuous proclivities otherwise meant to remain private. These two concepts of decadence, like their predominant iconography, are traversed by misogyny. They are also accompanied historically by the pursuit of utopia—and the expression of feminist and queer forms of life. We consider how a diverse range of artists—from Baldung and Bruegel to Goya and Moreau, from Sarah Bernhardt and Claude Cahun to Florentina Holzinger—have represented, enacted, and responded to the tensions inherent in cultural decadence and the peculiar forms of historical consciousness it awakens. What is at stake when artists mobilize a particular decadent image—consumptive, digestive, scatological, parodic, pathological, perverse, erotic—and what forms of interpretation do these gestures demand? To the degree that decadence engulfs us today, this seminar seeks to explore the capacities of the arts, past and present, to recalibrate culture, aesthetics, and the ethics of taste. Readings include: Proudhon, Sade, Baudelaire, Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Bataille, Bakhtin, Kristeva, Sianne Ngai, Elaine Showalter, Jack Halberstam, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Sarah Ahmed among others.