Things Art History students are sick of hearing

Art History, or mainly the people who study it, have a notoriously bad reputation. We’ve become a bit of a joke, eyes instantly roll when I tell people what I studied at uni. You know the type: stuck up private-schooled girls from London who never do any work and chat about Picasso the true meaning of ephemerality at dinner parties. They wear sheepskin coats, are really cliquey and only do the course because they wanted to go to uni but didn’t know what to study.

We get a lot of stick, and here are the things we’re fed up of hearing:

‘So you must be really good at drawing, right?’

There’s no drawing on our course whatsoever, it’s like some people ignore the History part. Yeah we study art, but that doesn’t mean we actually do any ourselves. It’s the same way a English Literature student studies books, we look at art works to try and work out what they mean. 

‘All you do is look at paintings all day’

Yeah alright, we look at a lot of paintings. But most of our time is spent analyzing those paintings, reading books and articles and writing 5,000 word essays on them. We have to work out what the artist was trying to say by researching things like the time and context they were painted for, the artist who created it and the things the artwork references. You can’t just look at an art work and suddenly know what it means. It takes time, research and so many comparisons to come up with a well-argued meaning.

Me every day

‘That’s not a real subject’

People act like we don’t even know what our own degree is, that we just sit around all day looking at pretty pictures and being moody. What is expected of us is no different to any Humanities subject. Our course is a bit of everything – History, Literature, Religion, Theology, Politics, Philosophy, we even cover stuff like Psychoanalysis.

‘You’re barely ever in lectures, what’s the point in even going to uni?’

It’s true we have less contact hours than most other subjects, but the lack of time spent in lectures means we’re expected to do extra amounts of reading and coursework. We normally have at least three modules a term, with a minimum of two essays and a presentation for each. We normally have less lectures and more seminars too, at Manchester final years have three three-hourseminars a week, with at least an hours reading for each.

‘What job will that lead you to?’

It’s a creative course, and can lead you to most things in art, fashion, PR, journalism or media. We’re doing it because we’re quite creative, so we probably want a creative job too. And isn’t it a good thing that we’re not doing a course for getting a specific job? I don’t have to decide what we’re going to do for the rest of my life until I’ve graduated, while you had to decide when you were 16 choosing your A-Levels.

‘Your exams must be so much easier than mine’

Your questions probably have absolute answers, at least you have a rough idea whether you’re doing alright or not. There’s no way of guessing in an Art History exam, if you haven’t revised it’s pretty hard to come up with a 2,000 word argument on something you have no clue about.

‘You sound really pretentious’

To be fair it is quite hard to talk about the role of femininity in Boticcelli’s Venus without sounding like a dick, but we’ll get drunk and do it for fourty minutes anyway.

Clinging to the only boys on the course

‘You’re all really posh’

Art History has become known as a posh subject for two reasons. Firstly, it’s normally only private schools that do the subject for A-Level, but mainly because it’s what Prince William studied when he was at St Andrews. A lot of us probably did go to private school, but you could say the same about courses like Theology or Psychology.

‘Everyone dresses the same and thinks they’re too cool for anything mainstream’

We normally don’t wear big-brands, not because they’re “mainstream” but because I guess we do have a romantic idea of how to dress as an art student. We’ll wear stuff that we think looks good and do pride ourselves on wearing stuff that’s a bit different.

‘What’s with all the sheepskin?’

Yeah, a lot of us do wear sheepskin coats. They’re warm, comfy and they give off that 90s look that we love. I don’t have a problem with that, so why do you?

Yeah I own a sheepskin coat

‘People only chose Art History when they want to go to uni but don’t know what to study’

No, we chose it because it’s something we have a genuine interest in. We actually like looking at artwork and going to galleries, so why not do it as a degree? It mixes the creativity of an arts subject with the academics of a humanities subject and is a well-regarded degree.

‘So you want to work in a gallery?’

So everyone that does Buisiness Studies is going to be the CEO of Microsoft? People don’t do Art History because they want a job out of it, they do it because it’s a course they actually like learning about. We’re not in it for the money, soullessly slaving away on some boring equation we don’t care about – we’re actually enjoying it.

‘Why do only girls do it?’

Actually, that one’s pretty spot on. On a course of 50 people, it’s rare to have as many as 15 boys in one year group. It does immediately make them  30 per cent fitter though.

‘Everyone who does Art History knows each other’

Yeah we do, I don’t see why that’s a bad thing. It’s a small course, usually with around 40-60 people so naturally we’re close.

‘Modern art is all shit, I could do that’

Picasso is laughing in his grave because he made his millions drawing squares on a canvas and called it Cubism. Yeah maybe anyone could have drawn it, but it’s about the ideas that went behind it, the one’s Art Historians have dedicated their entire careers to analyzing. Artists don’t become famous because their art looks like a photograph. The value of the work is in the concept behind it.