I would say that I’ve been pretty lucky in regards to my art history education. My grandmother raised me on trips to museums, my AP Art History teacher in high school taught me concise ways to organize my thinking, and my first college professor emphasized the importance of context and connection. All of these factors put me on a path to understanding that art history is about so much more than memorizing names, dates, and mediums. Those things are important, sure, but a piece removed from context, given no critical thinking, and hidden from view? The meaning is lost. These lessons I have learned have shaped my goals for my future understanding of and fluency in art history.
My high school teacher taught us to organize our observational thinking, and that is something I would like to continue with—organizing my communication. It matters a lot to me that I keep track of my own thought processes. Because art is such a subjective and interpretive field, there are many, many opinions being thrown around. My own ones often get lost in the mix. Not only that, but I find some difficulty in stopping my train of thought. While sometimes effective in discussion, a stream of consciousness is often unappreciated in academic papers. Flow is not always good. Learning to take a step back, examine, separate, and organize my ideas in my papers and how they affect my argument as a whole is probably one of my biggest goals this semester. While I am proud of a lot of my ideas, they often shove themselves awkwardly where they do not belong. Being organized would make my papers more effective.
Dr. Galliera’s focus on context and connection leads to the second critique I received: the “so what” factor. Explaining, in a paper, why that paper is important and worth the reader’s time is something I tend to think I do. My theory is that because the importance is obvious to me, I allude to it throughout my paper without directly stating it. It sneaks into my examples and peeks out from my references like some little monster lurking in the shadows. But, it never steps out into the spotlight. I already know it, so I forget to state it. I suppose that I assume I already have.
Stated frankly and concisely, my goals for my academic writing are to be frank and concise. My thinking and my writing must be organized for clarity and it must communicate with impact. I would really like to keep the ball rolling on my art history luck.
Finally, I have a long-standing issue to sort out this semester. When I feel confident in a paper, it rarely fares as well as I expected it to. Granted—I have never failed a paper. I do not mean to give the impression that I am being drastically disappointed by these grades, when the truth is that I usually fall to, perhaps, a B when expecting a A+. And when I have given up all hope, embarrassed of the paper I am submitting, those assignments fair even better than the ones I was confident in. I don’t understand how this happens! I just cannot wrap my head around it. Is it my own self-criticism? Is it just a coincidence? This is something I desperately want to get to the bottom of.
At the end of the day, I’m sure the two correspond. If I can master structure and impact then maybe everything else will fall in place. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.