Rethinking ARCH 30 Foundations of Western Art in Antiquity

Resources:

• Penn's Visual Studies Program: "Eye, Mind and Image: An Interdisciplinary Program on the Nature and Culture of Seeing".

• Renata Holod's 1-minute lecture "Site of Sight, Right of Sight, and Rite of Sight: Exploring the Cultures of Seeing".

• Art Journal's Volume 54/3 (1995) issue is "Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey". Some interesting experiments there. Especially Irene J. Winter and Henry Zerner's piece "Art and Visual Culture" and Mark Miller Graham's "The Future of Art History and the Undoing of the Survey" are interesting.

• "The notion of the survey is tied to the authority of the panoptic gaze and the privileged perspective." (Graham 1995: 33).

• "Thus, it is no surprise that the image of culture created by the art history survey is too often estranging and intimidating to the student. The survey is authoritarian in suppressing the political motivations and dimensions of art to the point that for many students their estrangement from art is understood as the natural order of things... In the world of the survey text, art is always acclaimed; most survey texts belong to the genre of hagiography. Little wonder that we so often treat the canon of the art history- survey as a sacred thing: it appears before us as a given that preexists art history and not as the ideological sedimentation of the practices of art historians." (Graham 1995: 31-32)

• John Paoletti The Art History Survey Text: More, More . . .? on caareviews.org.

• David A. Levine and Larry Silver "Quo Vadis, Hagia Sophia?" Art History's Survey Texts on caareviews.org.

• My Introduction to Art History at Reed College. This was a thematically based, methodologically oriented course and not a survey. The non-chronological format of the course was a bit hard on some students. This syllabus, I feel, would fit to a bit higher level art history course and not so much what we would offer to our first year students.