Art History 101: the problem with the introductory survey course

I'm sure many people have taken the 100-level art history class to satisfy some sort of requirement: the general education "humanities" requirement, or perhaps you are an art history major and the 100 level intro class is required for your degree. Other people take the art history survey class as an upperclassmen who needs to fill their course schedule and figure, "Hey, it's a 100-level class. How hard could it be?"

As someone who has both taught and taken the 100 level class, it's rarely as easy as people want it to be. First: it's art history which many people fail to realize is NOT the same as art appreciation. Secondly: it requires memorization of names, dates, facts, styles and *gasp* requires you to match those facts with the image. If you fail to do so, you get the question wrong. And there's no way around memorizing - you just gotta do it, by any means necessary and pedagogical methods as of late really don't stress memorization or repetition. Third: 99% of survey courses fail to give any sort of depth. Instructors refer to the 100-level survey course as "Art History's Greatest Hits." This is akin to any "Greatest Hits" album: sure, Miles Davis Greatest Hits album gives you some stuff from Kind of Blue but it really neglects the more experimental and sometimes more exciting work from On the Corner. It's hard to give art historical context, significance, and formal technique within the confines of the survey course. Thus, students walk away from the survey class with a somewhat constricted point of view.

The survey course poses problems not only for the students, but the whole idea of the survey course is fraught with ideological turmoil for instructors. The Greatest Hits analogy aside, most 100-level courses are decidedly Euro-centric. If a student wants to see any of the Asian, African, Latin, native, or outsider art, then it will be given it's own, separate 100-level course: "Intro to African Art" or "Asian Art Survey." This move makes those types of art anterior (read: lesser) than the art covered in the "Art History: Ancient to Medieval" and "Art History: Renaissance to Modern" courses, which are mostly Western European and North American in its scope. The whole idea of an art historical canon has been attacked for being: patriarchal, oppressive, insensitive to the treatment of women and minorities, biased, and inaccurate. Which is to say, it has been attacked for the same reasons the history of the world has been attacked.

The structure of the course is also controversial for instructors and departments: how do we both introduce the subject and its methods to students? To ask students for a 2 page visual analysis is one thing, but a 5-7 page comparison paper is usually out of the question. And god forbid the paper's final grade be dependent upon grammar and writing style: you'll be bombarded with statements from students like, "THIS ISN'T AN ENGLISH CLASS, I REALLY DON'T THINK IT'S FAIR YOU MARKED ME OFF FOR RUN-ON SENTENCES."

So to summarize, here are the major problems with the survey art history course:
- limited in its treatment of art, and the works chosen are usually of the oppressive Euro-centric patriarchal type
- the textbooks are usually atrocious (As a side note: even deciding which works of art make it into the giant survey textbooks is completely crazy. See this article from nytimes.com for an example of the debate.)
- students confusing art appreciation and art history; general cynicism about what art is, and can be
- problems with the general structure of higher education

I've taken the 100-level survey course at a small, private, top 50 liberal arts college. And I've taught the 100-level survey course at large, anonymous state universities. So I've seen both sides of the debate and reallybecome more puzzled at how to fix the problem of the surve course. Unless there are major changes to both the discipline and the structure of higher education, I'm unsure how to fix the major concerns.

At the very least, I hope this blog fills in the gaps for people who never took the survey class, for those who took it but all knowledge flew out of their mind as soon as they took the final, and for those who are skeptical about art.