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

A Short Guide to Writing About Art (7th Edition) review:
3 stars (Useful in some ways, not in others.) - I recently read the 6th edition of this book in hopes that it would help me to improve my ability to understand and write about art. I found that the book is a direct, well-written primer for someone finishing high school or beginning their undergraduate degree, but for someone with a bit more experience, it turns out to be a mixed bag.I know next to nothing about visual art. I'm the quintessential "knows what I likes, and likes what I knows" type of guy. On the other hand, I'm a graduate student in English, so I'm 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. It's not about art, it's not about writing, so what is it? Well, like it says, it's about writing about art. A good deal of this book was useless to me, but some of it was enlightening. If you've 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 isn't a bad choice at all.
1 stars (points out the obvious) - A professor highly recommended this book to my art history class. I was disappointed in it. I had hoped it would offer some useful advice but instead it merely outlines the things anyone writing on a college level (and the book seems to be aimed at college students) should already know. Perhaps it would be better suited to high schoolers.
4 stars (Handy reference work) - My Art History department adopted this book as its official style-manual a few years ago, and we assign it as a textbook for our writing and methodology class. To my great dismay, however, our bookstore has had some trouble ordering it this year, and so I have encouraged my students to "cut the Gordion knot" by ordering it from Amazon. The chapters on choosing a topic and organizing an argument are, I think, useful and well-written, but the greatest value of this book is Chapters 9 and 10, which provide clear instructions for writing footnotes and bibliography. This may be a mechanical task, but it is a frustrating one for many students, because there are so many possible formats to use (MLA, Turabian, etc.) Barnet's system has the virtue of being designed specifically for research papers about art and art history, and the format he recommends is clear and logical. The book also reprints the instructions for contributors from the Art Bulletin, the most prestigious art-historical journal in this country, and so will be of value for graduate students and recent PhD's preparing their first works for publication.