AHIS BC1001

Decent workload (especially considering it's an intro class) but all very interesting.

A ton of readings I never did, a pretty difficult midterm and final (as in you have to memorize every piece of art we talk about at length), two essays, and weekly discussion sections that you must participate in.

it's a discussion section. like any other, you will do much better if you have, you know, something to say.

Bryda was incredible. His lectures were endlessly interesting and well thought out. Sometime he would overcomplicate a question, which led to some confusion, but all-in-all he was a fantastic teacher. Looking forward to taking another course of his in the future.

Although this might be interesting for an Art History major, I personally found it pretty boring, and I would not recommend this as the class you take to fulfill your art requirement. It's very difficult to do well in that for the exams you have to memorize the name of the piece, artist, time period, culture in which it was founded, and medium. You also have to memorize all of these ridiculous details about the work of art that are based on these far reaching concepts like "materiality" and "form" and "directionality." Basically if you show up to class and write everything down that Moxey says, and show up to discusson and write down everything the TA says, you should be okay, it's just really hard to concentrate. Moxey drones on and on, mumbles under this delusion that everyone can hear him, and barely teaches; the class is basically taught by a host of guest lecturers who each assign a ton of readings. The class begins with Moxey giving a short history over the topic of the day, saying he knows nothing about the topic, then handing it onto the guest lecturer, who says the same thing he does only in more detail, leading to your notes becoming very disorganized given the fact that one piece of art can be spoken about multiple times. The TAs are pretty helpful and willing to meet with you, and are especially nice if you seem like you're interested in the topic (just pretend; it…

oh please. i remember this woman. she was my TA for second semester intro art history section. my success in the class had absolutely nothing to do with her; if it weren't for the mandatory section attendance rule, i would have gladly skipped the boring torture and saved myself some brain cells. take careful note of what she says, and make sure to barf it back to her in some form or another in the papers. as with most art history TA's, always remember just how much smarter she is than you. write precisely and clearly but don't swoop in with any brilliant insights of your own, because no one here wants that from an intro student. </bitterness>

I think I got lucky with my TA-- def recommend Sanja!! She was amazing, very generous grading, good feedback, always made time for us, and very clearly outlined expected knowledge for each required reading, exam and paper. Very passionate and well read, did a great job explaining how the artworks discussed in class and the required readings were connected. People exaggerate those readings too much. Yes he links a lot of readings, but there is only one required reading per section meeting, so like only six or seven required readings the whole course. They're all standard academic papers. It really didn't feel that bad, but that could just be because I had a great TA. Overall very doable, but 100% memorization based. Would not recommend taking at the same time as another memory based class (ie. an introductory language class, like I did). You're expected to be able to ID each required artwork, know their year of production (within a decade or so of accuracy, more range of error the older it is), who made and commissioned it if known, where it was made, and some general context that he went over in class. Still finished course with an A.

Weekly reading, which at times was no more than a short article but could also be impossibly dense (it really depended on the guest lecturer of the week). Three very short papers which were responses to the mandatory museum visits, were given far in advance, and were graded by your TA. One midterm with around 10 IDs of specific images, a handful of comparisons, and an essay (you could choose from two topics). The final exam was not cumulative, and was structured similarly but with fewer IDs and comparisons (people complained about not having enough time during the midterm, and so more time was given for each image but the required length of each ID was increased).

same as the other sections - readings, two papers, midterms, final.

Overall good course, recommend, but oh my godddd please can he learn to space out his lectures better. For the first hour of the class he takes his time, going off on tangents and showing pictures of when he visited the monuments (but only the non western ones...), and for the rest of the lecture his words start fusing into the shape of cthulhu itself and it becomes impossible to write down more than one out of five ideas he's saying unless you're quite literally god. Lecture content is rich and deep when it's on his chosen field of study, medieval christian art, but clearly a lot more lacking on anything else. Instead of being able to talk about the topic at will, he'll just stick to what he has in his notes. It's not so bad that I would call him racist or anything, but it is definitely apparent in the course content what his interests were, and I did wonder many times if we didn't have another professor that was more well versed in a diversity of art history topics throughout the course. He's mid as a lecturer in general, there were both a few lectures I slept through and another few that kept my interest the whole way through. Overall though, content was very thought provoking, often interdisciplinary in nature, deeply connected to history, anthropology, and more. Class is ENTIRELY lecture based. Make friends bc if you miss a lecture and have no one's notes for it, you're s…