World Wide Web World

No More Pencils, No More Books

SmARThistory is the work of Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, two professors of art history who were “dissatisfied with the large college textbooks [which] were difficult for many students, contained too many images, and just were not particularly engaging.” Their solution is a shotgun approach to learning—they write concise articles and podcasts about major themes in art history and post them to their growing website, smarthistory.org.

Each movement is illustrated by a scant few images. Rococo, for instance, is explained via an exploration of a single painting—Fragonard’s The Swing—that, of course, is the quintessential Rococo masterpiece. Since so many of the era’s artistic trends are illustrated in the airy scene he depicts, the website’s writers figure something like, “well, if someone reads the few paragraphs we’ve written on this image, she’ll have a pretty good idea of what painting was like in Europe right before the French Revolution.” So the site is not comprehensive, but it’s plenty broad, covering art in Classical Antiquity through the present.

There are more than 150 podcasts that, again, focus on a single work as explained by the professors. We like that it’s free and growing, and that there’s a Contribute section. Pedantry changes and we’re not married to the old textbook model of learning—we know that we never bought a copy of our Intro to Art History course’s textbook, and we did just fine, thank you (thing cost $80, and we had beer and quesadillas to buy).

Which brings us to another nice point in smARThistory’s favor—it’s free and ad-free. SmARThistory is searchable and can be organized by time, style, artist, and theme. Hoo-ray!

Tags: art history, learning, pedantry, podcasts, the death of print, the innernet