The Art of Describing

Overview

The Art of Describing explores how art historians transform direct experience of artworks and architecture into verbal descriptions. Through a series of lectures, site visits and seminars, it develops your art-historical skills of visual investigation and oral presentation.

Art History is a discipline with both historical and aesthetic interests and ambitions, and a discipline that also contains a very significant object-focussed and site-visit component. These various modes of understanding must be communicated through language, both written and oral. The Art of Describing therefore offers you a sustained, supervised experience of investigating works of art and architecture, as well as a variety of exhibition spaces, at first hand, so as to develop your skills in communicating how we see and interpret works of art and architecture in their current settings. The module also aims to give you an opportunity to develop potentially transferable cultural heritage skills by giving you sustained experience of giving audio-visual presentations on works of art and architecture, both singly and in small groups, in front of the objects and away from them; as well as the experience of reflecting upon and improving that experience.

Aims

At the end of the course students should have acquired:

• experience of a range of different works of art and architecture in local museums, galleries and public spaces
• a fuller understanding of experiencing artworks at first hand vs discussing them at a distance
• experience of giving audio-visual presentations, in small groups and individually, in front of and away from particular works of art and architecture
• a fuller understanding of the particular challenges of turning direct experiences and interpretations of works of art into verbal prose