ARTH 4000 - Good Looking: Writing About Art & Visual Culture

The course introduces students to reading, looking, and writing about art and visual culture. In addition, it will introduce students to seminal theoretical texts that address the issues of visual perspectives on race, class, gender, the body, art and culture. The assigned texts raise relevant questions: What is an image? How does one acquire visual literacy? What is the relationship between word and image? How does one approach and write about images effectively? Where does meaning reside? How has the emergence of the Internet and the digital camera changed our notions of an image and its replications? The course is structured around different media and thematic issues. One of the goals of the course is to teach students to write about all facets of art and visual images; more importantly, students will walk away from this course with the knowledge of, and polished skills in, different writing styles (descriptive, analytical, theoretical, creative/poetic, and research).