In you had to choose one book about Art History, which would it be?

>subversive
That's the idea, yeah

>corrupts
Define that please

>This shit is what leads to people talking about politics surrounding art rather than works of art themselves.
Politics is an inseparable part of humanity. Because art is created by humans, it cannot be separated from any of this. Any analysis of art without considering its context would be shallow.

>Define that please
It's a distasteful and intentionally wrong reformulation of an already established enterprise. It does not develop things further, it makes things a clusterfuck.

>Politics is an inseparable part of humanity.
Yeah, and? Political evaluation =/= artistic evaluation. An artistic evaluation is one that pertains to the work of art in question; the employed techniques of the artist and the finished work and its effects. Political analysis is besides the art.

>Any analysis of art without considering its context would be shallow.
Political analysis is not an analysis of art. It says nothing about things like use of color and contrast and other techniques in painting, for example. This shitty line of reasoning of yours is exactly the problem with subversive garbage like that.

I majored in art history, and maybe for that reason I tend to enjoy the less theory-based ones in favor of those that are heavier on the History-with-a-captial-H side of art history.

>The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century by Svetlana Alpers
Pic related. A classic in the understanding of northern vs. southern European classical painting.

>Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock by Kirk Varnedoe
I read this for an aesthetics class instead of a history class, so it's more in that style. There's a lot to be interested in even if you don't care about (or even hate) modern abstract art.

>Greek Art and Archaeology: A New History, c. 2500-c. 150 BCE by Richard Neer
One of the best textbooks I read.

>The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria by Zainab Bahrani
A bit too postcolonial for my general taste (lots of showy quotes at the start of chapters), but the basic thesis it develops is fascinating.

just watch angry youtube videos about modern art

gotta go with jansens bro

Art Since 1900
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
The Anti-Aesthetic
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Image Music Text

The best way to study art history is to simply study art.

no mistake going with gombrich

Have you studied art history to be able to say that it you can learn the same thing through "simply studying art"? What would this simple studying of art consist of?

...

I'm not saying you shouldn't read anything. The best art historians are the ones who conclude that the best way to understand art is from the direct study of it, i.e. from experiencing it. You need to experience art for yourself. The study of art history is worthless without that. Experiencing a huge amount of art is also the best way to get a grip on what art has been and is about. You need literature to formulate your thoughts better, of course, but literature can only formulate what you already know but don't yet know how to articulate yourself.

Best books about iconoclasm?

>Politics is an inseparable part of humanity
No, it's not.

The Power of Images: Studies in the History of Call and Response by David Freedberg

I'm interested in studying art history. How is it? Will I have to deal with too many relativists, feminists, anti-imperialists and the likes?

Nice site, though the mantra "every painter paints himself," while true, is a little dangerous. It can be misread to mean that there is no tradition in art worth studying and that the people behind art are more important to study.

So why did the laws of perspective come into being round the rennaisance? Art history analyses the ways people saw so as to produce works, no? Judging pre-perspective art through a perspective way of seeing the world would miss the point, or at least get at it in a different way.

You sound like someone convinced in the immutability of human form and ways of being.

>why did the laws of perspective come into being round the rennaisance?

Pic related: fresco from Pompeii

Depends what you study. Generally, the older the period you study the less of this you'll see. Also it seems there's less of this in non-western art history fields.

I'd choose Gombrich's Art and Illusion, or Edgar Wind's Art and Anarchy. Both contain lots of historical information about art, but are only peripherally Art Histories, however.

>Politics is an inseparable part of humanity.
the leftist says this so they can insert their politics into everything

hey, this is the list I posted a few weeks back in a different thread
would also recommend Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (probably the single most important text), Bishop's Artificial Hells, Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics

I'm saving the recommendations in this thread, because this is something I know nothing of and have been thinking about studying a bit for a while, thanks anons.

Question though:
Any specific recommendations for "history of literature"? Let's say that I want to understand "what are the main ideas in contemporary literature and how they came to be", what should I read?

I don't know how good it is, but I've just started reading "Gardner's Art through the Ages: A Global History" because there's a HQ 1GB pdf of it on libgen.

It's a good list, really enjoying it so far!

You can't have much of a humanity to speak of without some form of politics no matter how rudimentary.

Who told you about relational art? Bourriaud's book is fantastic, I honestly never thought I would see someone mention it here.

>Art history analyses the ways people saw so as to produce works, no?

That's not ALL that art history is, or should be.

The understanding of art does not fall into place from merely understanding the artists. This is an error. You must understand the experiences of art, too. Not just what shaped the eye that saw or the ear that heard, but how the eye saw and how the ear heard, and what it was like to see and hear with those eyes and ears. The amount of history you know means little towards knowing what it's actually like to experience art.

My problem with art historians who leave it at that is that they end up saying very little about art in the long run. They can tell you all about the man Rembrandt — but how many of them can tell you what it's like to look at a painting by Rembrandt? The sensations it brings. Those sensations are important — those sensations ARE the art! Everything about the man is just context. It says nothing about what it felt like to see his paintings at the time.

If we place too much emphasis on the context, the background, the personal lives of the artists, then we get rubbish analyses that end up turning art into a game of message-embedding and political-wavering. Analyses that mind little about the experience of art, that are practically hostile to it, who only care about the social prestige associated with art. You get history that talks about the political circumstances that an artist found himself in rather than the techniques and methods that he innovated in the art form.