Cut and paste from Chicago Shark Forum where they discussing art history teaching<\/p>\n
this my take on it…<\/p>\n
I began with basic Italian Renaissance studies whilst at (high) school and progressed to the then recent John Berger (Ways of Seeing) and the key text for art schools in 1970’s – Gombrich.<\/p>\n
After that we drifted through a B.A. of left-wing analysis (John A. Walker) and feminist critiques and even some eroticism (Peter Webb) but already things had begun to fracture into self-serving partitions. There was no agreed standard texts before I’d graduated and the life-room and the life-model were jettisoned along with the rest of the ‘past’ in the 1980’s.<\/p>\n
It would be interesting to see what ‘Complementary Studies’ are now on offer but I fear that as mentioned the baby has been thrown out with the bath water.<\/p>\n
By 1988 I was being criticised for reading Peter Fuller’s explorations of Ruskin as being a proto neo-con (even though Fuller had come out of a Left Wing press and theoretical base).<\/p>\n
I still have the Fuller books and value them more than the feeble justifications of those who backed Saatchi and Brit Art rather in the manner of a cart careering down hill dragging its horses behind….<\/p>\n
When the ‘looking’ agenda was mentioned I immediately thought of Adrian Stokes<\/p>\n
http:\/\/adrianstokes.com\/<\/p>\n
Is he read much or at all in the States? I doubt he is on many undergraduate syllabi here. Indeed I doubt many of the students could actually read it or be given time to read it.<\/p>\n
Also some of the most profound art criticism that has affected me has come from artists themselves like Mr. Conger. Graham Sutherland comes to mind but there are many more.<\/p>\n
At what point did the patronising and sometimes unreadable babbling off curators take precedent over the artist’s comments and is it just my observation from U.K. perspective that exhibitions have become increasingly reliant on curator ‘explication’ often printed out on leaflets and gallery walls.<\/p>\n
As a young man I drifted through the Ashmoleum in Oxford and just ‘looked’ at paintings and like William I can still see them in my mind’s eye I do not need explications to do that.<\/p>\n
If our contemporary young painters have not looked will they ever be able to see beyond the next fashion handed down to them????<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cut and paste from Chicago Shark Forum where they discussing art history teaching this my take on it… I began with basic Italian Renaissance studies whilst at (high) school and progressed to the then recent John Berger (Ways of Seeing) and the key text for art schools in 1970’s – Gombrich. After that we drifted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-criticism","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/criticism\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/criticism\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/criticism\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/criticism\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/criticism\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/criticism\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/criticism\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/criticism\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/criticism\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}