Customer Reviews

Art History's History

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This is a great little summary of the discipline of Art History. It's a concise & well-written overview of the place of Art in Western History and Academica, from Ancient Greece to 20th Century America. You'll find it to be an easy but very informative read. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in Western Art, Philosophy, and/or History.

This book was required reading for my graduate Research Methods and Writing course. We used it in conjunction with Donald Preziosi's the Art of Art History. The combination of the two books is a great resource for anyone entering their MA in Art History. Art History's History is a helpful overall review of the different time periods. It is a good resource for reader-friendly art historical writings.

Minor has undertaken the impossible. Any historiography that is limited to 200 pages will undoubtedly be overly reductive. However, this does not entirely discredit Minor's work. While one may take issue with him in a number of places (particularly his chapter on feminism) he provides a generally well-balanced, user-friendly introduction to theories of modern scholarship. Minor is very cognizant of his own fallibility. He recognizes that his sketches of modern methodologies are inadequate. But he provides the necessary background for anyone who wishes to understand the state of contemporary art history.
At the conclusion of this book the reader is left unsatisfied. Yet I think that this may have been Minor's intent (I realize I am being a terrible deconstructionist). His aim, rather, seems to be to ignite an interest in students of art history, that they might, of their own volition, continue their study of art historical methodologies. If this is indeed Minor's aim, he succeeds.

I'm compelled to read this book for an MA program in humanities, but it's a painful assignment. To get any meaning at all from it requires fighting through woolly sentences to some kernel of meaning, and even then the meaning is so ill-defined that I can't be sure I've learned anything at all. Then there are the meaningless sentences that are almost parodies of bad undergraduate writing: "Vasari's story, like so many, has a beginning, a middle, and an end." This book needed a good editor, although as an editor myself, I'm not sure what I could have done with it besides query almost every paragraph. I'll be looking for other, clearer resources where a chapter in this book is required for a writing assignment.

This book includes great summaries, comparisons, and explanations for various methodologies on the history of art. If you are taking any sort of methodology or historiography class for art history, it is a great aid.

This is a great little summary of the discipline of Art History. It's a concise & well-written overview of the place of Art in Western History and Academia, from Ancient Greece to 20th Century America. You'll find it to be an easy but very informative read. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in Western Art, Philosophy, and/or History.

This book was my first purchase on Amazon and I'm very happy with it. At first I wasn't sure of buying on internet and stuff but I decide it worth a try and took a chance on Amazon. I recieved the book in less than a week even though I order it standard.The book was in good conditions and I totally recomend this seller.

A plodding piece of literature in which the reader must wade through endless self-gratifying sentences in order to reach any material of artistic substance or value