A Short Guide to Writing About Art (7th Edition)

I know next to nothing about visual art. Im the quintessential "knows what I likes, and likes what I knows" type of guy. On the other hand, Im a graduate student in English, so Im well-practiced in writing essays and in applying various theoretical and critical methods. I read this book in the hopes that it would help me to better understand art. That is, I wanted to learn, as Sylvia Barnet puts it, "How does art mean?" The beginning of the text does introduce some basic questions and ways to think about different kinds of art, ranging from painting, to sculpture, to architecture, to photography, to video art, etc. However, this is not meant to be an instructional book to teach someone about art. It is more like an assistant text for a freshman-level art history course. A great deal of the book is spent discussing how to organize essays, sentence structure, revising, formatting, and some instruction on critical methods. But, again, this book is not a book on writing. Its not about art, its not about writing, so what is it? Well, like it says, its about writing about art. A good deal of this book was useless to me, but some of it was enlightening. If youve already got some experience studying the visual arts, or some experience writing, or you just want a really indepth study on either, pick out something else. If, however, you just want an easily understood, basic primer on writing and art, this isnt a bad choice at all.