Art History - Outside of a Dog

144 pages

English language

Published by Oxford University Press, USA.

ISBN:: 9780192801814
OCLC Number:: 505716212

(1 review)

Art history encompasses the study of the history and development of painting, sculpture, and other visual arts. Here, Dana Arnold introduces the issues, debates, and artefacts that make up art history, and also explores the emergence of social and cultural histories of art. Using a wide range of example, she goes on to discuss key aspects of the discipline, including how we write about, present, read, and look at art.

Cover painting by Phillip Atkins.

2 editions

Another Hopeful Fool reviewed Art History by Dana Arnold

Informative and respectfully brusque

3 stars

Good intro to the concepts and some key figures of art history. As a personal aside, I've been taking up shifts working the counter at a small art gallery, so I got to "test out" some of my newfound art history chops in real time. So while I can't hope to compare to the veterans, I was at least able to avoid embarrassing myself too badly--so I can consider that a testament to the utility of this book.

The delivery is economical, and uses accessible language. I feel like this is the author's voice coming through: some sentences give the impression they were tacked on as afterthoughts, or maybe as part of a final edit pass. They feel parenthetical, but they're not actually in round brackets, and the author does very little to explain them.

This kind of lack embellishment (or "didactics" for the art folks hehe) is the style …

Good intro to the concepts and some key figures of art history. As a personal aside, I've been taking up shifts working the counter at a small art gallery, so I got to "test out" some of my newfound art history chops in real time. So while I can't hope to compare to the veterans, I was at least able to avoid embarrassing myself too badly--so I can consider that a testament to the utility of this book.

The delivery is economical, and uses accessible language. I feel like this is the author's voice coming through: some sentences give the impression they were tacked on as afterthoughts, or maybe as part of a final edit pass. They feel parenthetical, but they're not actually in round brackets, and the author does very little to explain them.

This kind of lack embellishment (or "didactics" for the art folks hehe) is the style of the book. I liked it, it lent itself to a brisk pace of reading, while leaving lots of little breadcrumbs for further research and interesting thoughts to puzzle over.