Category: Studying

  • New York: Day 1 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art

    New York: Day 1 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art

    Painted in Waterlogue

    Today was Day 1 in New York. Well, actually yesterday was technically Day 1, but that mostly involved flying from Heathrow to Brussles to New York. It was all relatively uneventful – except for the ridiculous high winds that caused rather a lot of turbulence for well over 50% of the flight. And the slippy landing at Brussles on an unprepared landing strip. And waiting over an hour for the car plane wash to remove the snow from the long-haul plane. And the almost 90 minute wait in customs in New York (so long, in fact, that our luggage was removed from the belt and dumped unceremoniously into the middle of the floor). And the subway line that wasn’t running on the weekends – which they didn’t tell you when you got the airport transfer train out to that particular subway – meaning we had to take a replacement shuttle bus at breakneck through Queens which was quite frankly terrifying.

    However the hotel was an oasis of calm. The room is small. Tiny in fact. But we have the most wonderful rainforest shower and the bed is seriously comfortable. There’s a burger joint downstairs which appeared to do incredible vegetarian burgers, so Adam went downstairs to do the hunter-gatherer thing. Except it was closed for refurbishment so he headed down to the next block where he found a pizza place.

    Holy Fuck. I’m telling you, Abitino’s Pizza is amazing. It tasted of everything New York should taste like as far as I’m concerned. We had thick Italian-American style pizza dough encasing various combinations of ricotta, mozzarella, aubergine and spinach. And the tomato sauce! The tomato sauce was amazing. I’m going to have to start experimenting with making my own tomato sauce this summer – better plant some tomatoes in the garden.

    2015-01-24 18.59.29 (1)

    And then we pretty much just went to sleep because we were completely carbed out and we’d been up for about 24 hours or so. Living the high life, etc.


    Midnight local time… woke up. Went back to sleep.

    4am local time… woke up. Ate remaining pizza. Went back to sleep.

    Got up… 6am.

    Decided to go to the Met.

    We walked 14km in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Yes, you read that right. 14km INSIDE the Met (and 6km there and back to the hotel).

    We saw:
    The American Wing
    Arms and Armour
    Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas
    Modern and Contemporary Art
    Medieval Art
    Ancient Near Eastern Art
    Art of the Arab Lands
    Greek and Roman Art
    Asian Art
    19th and Early 20th Century European Art
    Photographs
    Musical Instruments.
    Some Special Exhibitions

    We might have seen about half of the place… back again later in the week. Check out the map here, with marks on to show you the bits that we managed to see.

    More thoughts on the Met later.

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    2015-01-25 19.38.58

    Then we came back to the hotel. And died. And managed to eat some chips and dips before wandering to the local grocery store, drinking tea and watching trash TV. It’s a TV show where they bid on abandoned storage units and then sell the stuff they get. It’s very odd. But really rather good.

    Over and out.

    2015-01-25 20.05.48

  • On turning thirty

    I’m still five months away from turning thirty. It happens next April, I’m spending a week in Paris with University and then Adam to mark that I’ve managed to survive thirty years without too many bumps and scrapes.

    I frequently have moments where I fill with self-doubt and feel like I’ve failed in my ambitions. Like the fact that I’m not some well known photographer with a great reputation, or a renowned art critic.

    And then I remember that I’ve only really been out in the big, wide world for ten years, I’ve still got ages to get a handle on my career. I’m not even half way through my working life yet. I don’t retire for another forty years if I follow the government plan which means in fact that I’m only a fifth of the way into my career. Although looking at it like that is slightly terrifying.

    I don’t think it helps that I choose to be surrounded by brilliant and ambitious people, many of whom are already doing well in their careers – although the benefits of living with someone so stimulating are already becoming clear as in the last three months I’ve begun to plan and attack large projects than I personally thought were possible (and I’m not just talking about Ingress here).

    I’ve had a setback this week. I got only 50/100 in the first essay that I submitted in my second year at university. This is such a huge drop for me. Previously my average of essays has been 70% with some hitting as high as 85%. It’s felt like a bit of a devastating blow and I get personal feedback tomorrow in a tutorial. I’m currently writing my second essay of the year for another module (it’s due in this afternoon at 1300hrs, I’m taking a short break) and I can’t help but rid the feeling that everything is crap.

    But that’s what being in your twenties feel’s like, doesn’t it? Like you’re pushing boulders up a hill, but you have no idea how big the hill is or how far you have to go. And every so often you drop the boulder and it rolls all the way down the hill for you to have to start pushing again. That’s the story of my life really. Apparently your thirties get better. I hope so. Either way things generally seem to be looking up – apart from my degree marks which appear to be going down.

  • Learning to write

    Learning to write

    This might sound like a strange title for a post. After all, I do make my living from writing and I’m also doing very well in a subject that involves lots of writing at university.

    I know we’re all supposed to get our grammar education while we’re at school, but it’s often not quite that simple. I seem to remember having English lessons that attempted to teach us the difference between a verb, a noun, and an adjective but I was never really that interested. I always figured that as long as I could express myself and be understood then it didn’t really matter. You see, there was just so much to learn about the world that grammar rules seemed to just not really be that important in the grand scheme of things.

    2014-11-06 07.56.30

    But the reality is that I’m now a writer and that means I have to hold myself to some sort of professional standard. So I invested in the Oxford style guides and have the Guardian version on the way . Now I can look up words and see if it should be newborn, new-born, or new born. I can see if it’s the right time to use an Oxford comma or if I should be using an Em rule or an En dash.

    While the main reason for spending £40 on style guides is to improve my professional writing I’m also looking forward to improving my academic writing. I’m very good at what I do. I routinely have been getting marks of 75+ on both essays and exams. My grasp of the content of the modules we study is pretty good but I feel it’s my writing that lets me down.

    I struggle to express myself in a nuanced way sometimes and find that I can’t write down exactly what I want to say. The words seem clumsy and inelegant too much of the time and they don’t do justice to the arguments I’m making.

    So in the future I’m hoping that whenever I write academically or professionally I’ll just spend an extra bit of time checking things against the style guides and making the words play nicer together. And occasionally I’ll just dip into a few pages for fun to try and learn something new.

     

  • Proposing to study video games

    Proposing to study video games

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    So I’d previously decided that I wanted to study photography and self portraits for my independent study module as part of my undergraduate degree.

    I’ve changed my mind. Feminist photography critique is a massively over subscribed-subject. People aren’t saying exactly what I’d like to say, but there are people saying things that are very similar. What I really wanted was to find something that was close to photography but not photography. A subject where I could acquire skills that could be applied to photography (as well as other areas of contemporary art and design) but an area that also offered the tantalising possibility of creating genuinely groundbreaking research.

    Video Games

    You heard that right. Video Games. They’re very much an untapped resource when it comes to academic scholarship. Although there is comprehensive game design and game theory scholarship out there, there’s very little that focusses on the social implications of games. There’s lots of critique too, but out of critique comes scholarship and I plan to be riding that first wave.

    Since I know that several people are interested in following what I do with this module I plan to blog about it. And for completeness you can download my initial proposal here:

    Video Game ISM Proposal

    Hopefully I’ll post more about my rational about choosing this as a subject later… but for now… to work!

  • What are art museums for today?

    An excerpt from an essay I wrote earlier this year. Minus it’s introduction, conclusion, and paragraphs about how religion is the opiate of the masses, and art museums allow us to worship at the temple of artists.


     

    But how do art museums choose what should fill their space? The acquisition of video games into MoMA’s collection[1] could be seen as giving the power of deciding what becomes art to the collective mind of the proletariat. Admittedly the acquisition is part of the design collections rather than the higher status art collection, but it does work to verify the taste of those that video games are aimed at. However Raph Koster asserts that popular entertainment, such as games, are accessible whereas art requires literacy.[2] This presents a problem within an institution where the framework is apparently built around education – how do you educate in a subject that is already theoretically accessible to all? It does also start to question why art should require literacy and education to understand, if video games are now classified as art and require no such consideration.

     

    MoMA’s video game acquisition also highlights another role of some art museums today. Since its inception MoMA has always placed itself as an arbiter of taste, setting out with an aim to introduce the American public to the new European modern art.[3] It is unsurprising then due to its bold collecting strategy and its remit being all aspects of modern culture that it would decide to break the mould and define video games as art. Compare that to the Tate collection and the picture is very different. The Tate acquisition policy states that ‘Tate will only acquire works by artists who have demonstrated their ability over a reasonable period of time’ which presumably precludes non-established new media. However the Tate also work in conjunction with the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum so it could be unfair to consider just one of those institutions alone when new media may be more suited to the Victoria and Albert museum, for example.[4] This does highlight the different approaches afforded to art museums today, choosing to proactively define taste to their audience, or reacting to the tastes of society.

     

    Within the press release for the video games acquisition MoMA also states that as a museum its goal is to study and preserve items, not just to merely display them.[5] This gives us the idea of an art museum as a repository of objects of worth to somebody, but the question is who. In the case of a private art museum it may be items considered to be of worth to the owner or individual curators, however a national art museum has a much broader challenge; it must in some way seek to collect and preserve items that are relevant to the taste of those who fund it. While on one hand that means the large corporate organisations that donate, on the other hand it will often mean the tax paying public. So perhaps we will see more video games entering the collections of major art museums in the future.


     

    [1] “Video Games: 14 in the Collection, for Starters”, http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/11/29/video-games-14-in-the-collection-for-starters accessed on 23rd April 2014.

    [2] Raph Koster, “A Theory of Fun: 10 Years Later” (Slide 87), http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/gdco12/Koster_Raph_Theory_Fun_10.pdf accessed on 23rd April 2014.

    [3] “The Museum in the Twentieth Century”, Lecture notes, Museums and Society, Dr. Elizabeth Darling, 20th March 2014.

    [4] “Tate Acquisition and Disposal Policy, November 2011”, http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/11111 accessed on 23rd April 2014.

    [5] “MoMA Acquires 14 Video Games for Architecture and Design Collection”, http://press.moma.org/2012/12/moma-acquires-14-video-games-for-architecture-and-design-collection/ accessed on 23rd April 2014.

  • Why am I a feminist art historian?

    Why am I a feminist art historian?

    A few months ago I posted this video to my blog.

    Some people tell me that studying art history from a feminist point of view is pointless. That it’s irrelevant. What’s the point of writing about art history with a feminist slant when it’s so detached from what goes on around us on the street.

    It’s not.

    Everything has provenance.

    Screen Shot 2014-09-26 at 21.58.26

     

    I like the word provenance in this context. It’s other meaning is:

    The chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object.

    The ownership or custody… It kind of sums up the whole problem really. While attitudes towards women are gradually experiencing a counter-cultural revolution there are still many people who still have this outdated mindset. That women are there to be owned.

    This is the kind of day to day problem that we’re all very used to hearing about. Popular feminist campaigns regularly make the news, everything from Laura Bates and the Everyday Sexism Project to No More Page 3. I’m an avid supporter of both (and more). But this isn’t what I deal with when it comes to my academic interests.

    [no title] 1985-90 by Guerrilla Girls null

    I’m interested in the way that women have been treated historically. I personally mostly enjoy studying art post 1900 and seeing what it can tell us about women in society and the attitudes towards them. In fact I’m currently working on an essay with the title ‘Analyse the way in which gender has affected the interpretation and status of British women artists of the mid twentieth-century.’ And their status was indeed affected by their gender, as well as the way that we interpret their work. Remember it was only eighty six years ago that women gained even the most tenuous sign of equality – the right to vote.

    I like investigating the way that women (and LGBT artists, and artists of colour) have been treated in the past and getting down to the roots of patriarchal behaviour. I like examining how (or if) people tried to change attitudes and how the world responded to that. I like discovering work that isn’t considered canonical and questioning why it was not an acclaimed work. I like understanding the struggles that these artists faced.

    Because I believe that it’s only in understanding our past that we can influence our future. By knowing where we have come from we can understand the journey ahead of us. If we understand the things that we tried in the past and the effect that had on society we can make plans to change the future.

    But why art? Why not politics? Or history?

    Because art parallels society. It is influenced by the world around it and often it will influence the world. It is a distilled journal of the world in visual form. You can look at a work of art and read the circumstances that caused it’s creation, what drove the artist to create that form. It’s just another form of historical source, except that you need different skills to understand and interpret a work of art compared to a written journal or diary.

    It’s more than that though. When you look at a written source you have to believe that the author was being true to their words. You only have the words. However with an image, you see how the artist saw the world. It’s very hard to fake an imagine convincingly and convince the audience that you think something that you do not. You can see how society treated women from the artists status but also from the way that people are portrayed within the images themselves.

    It’s fascinating. And I plan on changing the world. But to change the world I have to understand how much it has already changed. There’s an awful lot to understand.

  • Choosing a photographer to study with

    Choosing a photographer to study with

    Very early on in my photographic career I discovered that my talent was most certainly not for taking photographs (although I’m not too bad at that either) but rather for looking at other peoples photographs. I worked out that with all the business acumen in the world I would never progress above the level of a-bit-better-than-average and I’d have to be happy on a lower end, modest salary for the rest of my life. Anyone that knows me will recognise that I’m not the kind of person to settle, so I took a long time working out what part of photography I am good at.

    I’m really good at looking at pictures. I can pull portfolio images together with ease that other people don’t seem to have. I can see flaws in images and identify how things could be better. More to the point I actually enjoy doings things like this far more than taking pictures. Talking about and looking at photos is what I’m good at so I decided to go to university to do a degree in History of Art. And I’m doing very well at it, getting a first at the end of my first year.


    But what does this have to do with choosing a photographer to study with?

    Lots of photographers claim to be able to offer an awful lot to new photographers. The reality is that they don’t. Only today I saw a wedding photographer on Facebook who was offering the ‘opportunity’ to assist him on two weddings this weekend. He said it was a great chance for someone looking to make a career as a photographer. He also said you had to provide all your own gear (a minimum of a basic digital camera and an 18-55mm lens along with a flash gun) as well as your own transport too and from the venues. Graciously he said you’d be able to take and use any pictures you like – I hope his clients are happy with that!

    The big, fat cynic in me started to creep out and ask questions and provide answers along these lines:

    • He stated he was shooting three weddings this weekend. Three weddings in a weekend? Fuck my life that’s alot. Quantity is certainly a viable business model but remember that you can’t have quantity, quality and low cost. One of those things has to give. He wasn’t a very expensive photographer.
    • The gear he wanted the assistant to provide. Top photographers will often have gear for their assistants. That way they know it’s all maintained, insured and in great working order. However often assistants do provide their own kit, so that’s not totally unusual. It was the mention of the 18-55mm kit lens that did it for me. You cannot shoot a wedding on an 18-55mm kit lens. It doesn’t let enough light in for the ceremony or the evening celebrations. It’s not long enough to shoot much of the ceremony from where an assistant is likely to stand. It’s not good quality enough to produce a high quality result. The kit lenses are generally soft and hard to get good results from – certainly in the hands of someone inexperienced. There’s no way in a million years I’d consider using a 18-55mm kit lens for a wedding I cared about producing good results for – there’s a reason you can pick them up for less than £20 on eBay. I’m not a gear snob at all, quite the opposite in fact. But if you’re shooting someones wedding, this isn’t a time for shooting with entry level kit most of the time.
    • If you’re looking for assistants who want a break in the industry you’re mostly going to be looking at young people. People who have just finished degrees or who have just finished school. Makes you a bit of an arsehole to say that you won’t drop someone too and from a train station or similar. Young people often don’t have their own transport and since they’re doing you a favour here as much as you’re supposedly helping them out, the least you can do is offer to pick them up from the station.
    • He also mentioned that he couldn’t pay because he had to pay for insurance for the assistant. Warning bells, he’s not charging enough money. Why can’t he charge enough money to pay for an assistant? Must be because his photos aren’t very good or he’s a terrible business person – do you really think you can learn skills about the industry from a person who is either of those things?
    • Lastly I looked at his pictures. My suspicions were correct, they were terrible.

    There is so much emphasis put on taking photographs. At first glance that sounds like a silly thing to say. Of course if you want to be a photographer you have to take lots of photographs, right? Well yeah, of course you do. But you also need to look at photographs and learn what good photographs look like.

    This is where you go ‘But Char! Art is subjective!’ yes well… no. But yes. It is, different people can have different aesthetic tastes, but quality is not subjective when it comes to traditional commercial photography. (I’m going to insert a disclaimer here that some people make ‘poor quality’ their style, I’m not discussing that).

    Before you even think about assisting someone for experience (i.e. without getting paid) or apprenticing someone you need to take some time out to educate yourself as to what a quality photographer means. Learning to recognise bad photoshopping or things like, oh you know, the whole fucking image being out of focus are crucial skills for an assistant. I mean we all think stuff like the following shot is really funny, but the reality is that lots of photographers skills are no better. And why would you want to work with someone like that?

    Strange-Boob-Photoshop

    As an assistant your job is attention to detail. Attention to what the photographer is doing, attention to what s/he wants, attention to the brides dress and to the grooms suit. Attention to detail is one of the more relevant skills that either a photographer or an assistant can have and you need it before you even do your first job.

    Learning this skill requires looking at images and learning why they work and why they don’t. My attitude to photography hasn’t always gone down well in the LRP world – I simply refuse to put pictures online that do not meet my standard. That means they must be in focus, they must be sharp, they must be well composed and they must have a good background – I’d say they are fairly minimal requirements for any photographer who wants to be half decent. You should not assist or try to learn from any photographer that doesn’t have those skills.

    Here’s a good example. A few weeks ago I shot some stuff for Evenlode. I was feeling kind of under the weather, it was hot, we were doing things in a hurry and I didn’t pay enough attention. This is a photo I love. You know what I don’t love? The fact that the belt isn’t centred with the rest of the armour.

    _MG_9936webIf a photographer is kicking out work with constant mistakes like this, you shouldn’t be studying from them. And you need to teach yourself to spot mistakes. That could be brides dresses being messed up, or it could be bad photoshopping or inability to focus, but before you even start to work with another photographer with the intent of learning you need to understand and recognise these things.

    Working with just any photographer won’t help you. You need to be picky and as an apprentice it’s your prerogative to do so. Don’t just take every opportunity that comes along, hunt people out. You’ll learn more and you’re learn quickly. And you’ll be better.

    Learning about images is just as important as learning to shoot images. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

     

  • GPA Frustrations

    GPA Frustrations

    So I just had a sneaky little look at my results from my first year at uni again to revel in my success for a bit (hey, I’m allowed to celebrate…) and noticed my GPA had gone online (it wasn’t last time I looked).

    My GPA is 3.88. Oh Noes.

    You see, I really want a 4.0. I wondered why I didn’t have an average of a 4.0 though, as that’s how I’d worked it out on my calculator the other week. Then I read again how the averages were worked out and was sad.

    Here’s the deal.

    The GPA or Grade Point Average is an American measurement of success at university. It roughly equates to our own 1st/2nd/3rd system here in the UK. A GPA 4.0 is a 1st. A 3.5 is an upper 2nd classification, and so on. You can be awarded a GPA of between 0.0 and 4.5.

    Here are my results from this year:

    Screen Shot 2014-07-22 at 10.11.21

    As you can see, I kind of sucked at the subjects that were not History of Art (Arts of Japan and Rise of the Modern World). However, that’s not the point.

    When I added those marks up and averaged them out, I got 70.37%. GREAT! I thought. That puts me tentatively into a 4.0. Exactly what I wanted to get. A 4.0 opens the doors to lots of top American and International universities, giving me plenty of options if I want to take them.

    So why did I get a 3.88 in my official result?

    Well you see they’re sneaky and they average it in a different way. Instead of going the way I went about it, they instead go:

    Give each module GPA score -> Average GPA scores.

    So basically above I got 3.5, 3.5, 3.5, 3.5, 4.5, 4.5, 4.5. When averaged that means I got just 3.88. That unfortunately doesn’t take into account my extraordinarily high 80%, or the fact that I got a 69, narrowly missing out on a 4.0 for that one. It defaults to the lower end of the category – i.e. no point in working harder than 65% if you’re not actually going to get a 70.  This to me encourages the wrong attitude.

    But I’ll suck up my GPA 3.88 (which isn’t a GPA 4.0) and see if I can work ultra hard to get a few more 4.5’s next year to bring up the average. That’s going to be very hard. Because just getting 4.0’s will not bring the average up enough.

    Bad system. It should take account of your total average mark, not allocate individual modules a GPA score. It effectively downgrades each of your individual grades up to 4%. And when you’re working at the top, those grades are hard-earned. And 4% at the top is much harder than 4% at the bottom.

  • Paperless Studying

    Paperless Studying

    I have lots of tech-savvy friends. I have lots of tech-savvy friends who discuss the merits of going paperless including lots of very technical ways of doing so.

    I am not very tech-savvy. (The other night I booted up my Windows install for the first time ever and managed to get malware on it within about ten clicks of the mouse.)

    However I have managed to go almost entirely paperless with ease for university. I mentioned it to someone and they said I should write down how I did it so that others can too. So that’s what I’m doing.


    I decided when I started university that I wasn’t going to be one of these people who spent hours and hours trying to locate notes when writing an essay or being frustrated that I couldn’t find that little golden bit of information that I required at 3am in the morning. Yes, I’m looking accusingly at some of my friends here. I’ve been through the pain with you on Facebook.

    Would you like to see the total amount of paper that I have accumulated from my first year in a humanities subject?

    image2

    And actually, everything you see between the yello and the pink dividers in that shot is just one subject where we were given all the readings we needed for the module in a photocopied book. Without that it would have been about one centimetre or less of paper. The stuff in plastic folders right at the bottom is the sum total of my first four modules in Semester 1.

    Of course, you’re probably all LOL’ing right now and doing something like…

    26zt9

    And in return I’m going:

    85236

    Make no mistake – humanities subjects require huge amounts of reading and note taking. Some of my friends have filled a whole lever arch file, some of them have filled more in just their first year. I have not, but I’m reasonably sure I’ve done at least as much reading and note taking as them.

    Anyway. Here’s the dig of how a non-tech-savvy person went paperless. Without all your fancy gadgets.

      1. I bought a premium subscription to Evernote. That allows me to upload 1GB of files per month and have 100MB per note. Sometimes I hit those limits with notes I write in the course of my business, but rarely. Never have I hit it with stuff for university.
      2. I bought one of these portable document scanners. I know it’s like, 200 on that Amazon page. But I got mine on eBay for 60. People buy this shit and then never use it. But, I am definitely going to use mine and recover each penny I spent on this. However, in case you do not wish to buy it as of now, you can still get your documents or books scanned. There tend to be firms (learn more if interested) that provide this particular service of scanning books and documents to make their digital copies and our lives easy. You may just need to find one near your area of residence.81DhsL6M2WL._SL1500_
      3. I bought a Macbook Air. Yeah I know, not the cheap option. However my old laptop virtually died on me and I needed something new. Plus I had some money to spend on a laptop (and Apple do a nice educational discount). The fact is though that you could buy one of those cheap 300 laptops to use at uni and never suffer because of it. All it needs to do is run Evernote and browse the web.In total my Evernote membership and the scanner cost less than many of my classmates spent on printing this year because they printed journal articles and stuff. So I figure I’m still onto a win.
      4. Every module gets it’s own notebook in Evernote.
        Screen Shot 2014-07-22 at 07.35.59There’s a complicated filing system going on here, as you can see. Modules that are ‘in progress’ just have their title. Modules that are finished get their module number added to them. Brookes handily uses the U pre-fix which means that they automatically drop to the bottom of my notebook list. Also it means I don’t have to remember the prefix when key wording which helps.
      5. When in class I write as much as possible directly into a note in Evernote. When we discuss paintings I also try to bring the images up in a Google search and paste them directly into my notes. Like this”
        Screen Shot 2014-07-22 at 07.41.04As you can imagine, this is pretty helpful. Much more productive than staring at a page of handwritten notes and trying to remember what the image looked like.You see it’s worth pointing out that I’m fundamentally lazy. I’ll do anything to avoid doing more work later.
      6. Journal articles. Evernote handles these particularly well. Journal articles almost always download in a PDF format. I import them into Evernote on download and then Evernote allows me to annotate them directly in the program. So I read them, highlight and make notes on them within Evernote and then save them. Evernote Premium churns them through it’s text recognition software too, so they’re all searchable within the file from within Evernote.Handily Evernote also has a feature that allows you to see your annotations at the top of the note too. So you don’t have to go searching through a 30 page PDF to find the five words that you annotated. It looks something like this and is extremely helpful for writing essays:
        Screen Shot 2014-07-22 at 07.47.08Helpful, no? In fact you wouldn’t believe how helpful this is when you’re scanning through trying to find stuff you want to quote in your essay. Brilliant. Just a flick of the down arrow key and you’re onto the highlights from the next journal article.
      7. Scanning all paperwork given to us. On that neat little document scanner. Then I file it away.The only process I’ve not managed to do more efficiently is taking notes from books. Kindle books are easy, but paper books not so much. I get pages that look like this and then scanned, and that makes me unhappy:
        image3But it’s not so bad. I keyword them so that I know what the subject was.
      8. Web Clipper. Evernote has a web clipper feature that allows me to save pages from my browser directly into notebooks in Evernote, with keywords. Awesome. I use this for looking up words I don’t know on Wikipedia and things and then saving them for future reference. It’s great for general background info about a subject. Or even for capturing a freeze of a page that you want to reference in an essay, because then you have a copy of the page you’re referencing, even if they change it.
      9. Tagging and saved searches. We’re usually given our essay subjects way in advance. In fact, most of the modules we were given them in the first week of the module. I like to spend lots of time thinking about my essays so I come up with some rough ideas and plans as soon as I get the title. Then whenever I read anything or take notes or save a journal article that could be relevant, I keyword it with something like “Museums and Societies Essay 1”. Evernote has a feature that allows you to save searches that you do regularly, so that I do then is I save a search for the relevant keywords and then pin it to the sidebar of the program.Of course I also include notes from past modules and other random clutter that I’ve collected from the web over the past few years. Like when I wrote an essay about the Africa galleries at the British Museum. I knew that I’d studied Benin and the way their art was presented at the BM during my OU degree, so all those notes got tagged and then brought into my smart search. We’d also touched on how minority art was treated by galleries in our Reading Art History module, so I pulled that note in too. Because keywords and smart searches allow you to pull notes in across subjects and keep all the relevant info at your fingertips without having a dozen open notebooks and folders.

     

     

    And that’s it really. As long as I spend half an hour a week scanning bits of paper that I’m given I stay on top of everything. I also use my phone to photograph whiteboards etc if I really need to.

    It works. It means I can spend more time working on learning stuff, writing essays and prepping for exams than trying to find that random note that I wrote in some long forgotten class. It also means that I have everything I’ve ever read or written with me at every lecture. Which is pretty bloody brilliant.

    In fact something I really love that Evernote does is that it shows you related notes while you’re writing. Sometimes it’s not quite right, but often when I sit down and start taking notes in a class it suggests things that I might want to review that I’ve written previously – which I always do when we come to a lull in the action.

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  • Female Agency in Art

    Female Agency in Art

    OR: WHY MY WORLD VIEW JUST GOT FUCKED.

    The problem with learning is that sometimes you learn things that you wish you could unlearn.

    I’d been quite happy with my art historical world view provided by such feminist scholars as Linda Nochlin and others from the 1970s era of rewriting the canon. The argument that there are few women artists in the historical ‘white male canon’ because they simply weren’t allowed to be there for various reasons sat well for me. I liked this explanation, it’s neat and it allows you to write with a confident view that could easily be backed up with good sources.

    Then somewhere around the late 1980s a bombshell got dropped. Someone said, ‘what if the women just… didn’t want to be artists?’. This… well… this causes me a problem.

    In the same way that I don’t believe that women completely autonomously choose to be Page 3 models, I simply don’t believe that women through history would just simply choose not to be artists. I mean of course, some of them will choose. However I don’t think that choice would have just been as simple as ‘I’d rather be an engineer’ for example. Not least because that career path was, again, just not open to them for various societal reasons.

    It’s kind of a bit like in your first Physics lesson at A-Level after successfully passing your GCSEs. When the teacher stands at the front of the class and basically goes ‘everything you learnt up until this point is pretty much bullshit’ and everything you thought you knew about light waves was destroyed. But then you realise that light can behave as both a wave and a particle and you understand how much learning you still have to do.

    So that’s where I’m at right now. Feminist art history was simple. And now it is not. Now we have to consider that women may have made their own choices about their hobbies and employment however I still think that many of those choices will have been dictated by the heavily patriarchal world that was forced upon the women in question.

    It’s tricky. But a good revelation going into my second year of study.