Weird Art Writing

AY2023/2024 Semester 1

Why write about art? What can writings by art historians and critics, as well as poets, novelists, and artists themselves tell us about artworks ? and what can artworks tell us about these writings? What experimental and downright weird forms does art writing take, and why? In this course you will examine a diverse range of unconventional approaches to writing about art and develop skills to critically evaluate these in relation to artworks. Through close readings of selected texts and artworks, you will gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between art and writing, guiding you to a theoretically and historically rigorous appreciation for the motivations for writing about art, and the nature of Art History as a scholarly discipline and de facto literary genre. This course is designed for students who have already taken introductory courses in art history and are interested in the discipline's global turn, and its relationships to literary studies and other fields in the humanities. In this course, you will study texts and artworks from various contexts globally, including in Southeast Asia, other Asias, the Global South and the West. This course invites you to participate in key scholarly debates within the discipline of Art History that coincide with the growth of interest in global art histories and decolonising approaches to art-historical knowledge.