The 12-Hour Art Expert

Everything You Need to Know about Art in a Dozen Masterpieces

Noah Charney

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538156605
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

"Brimming with examples from across the artistic spectrum, this is the perfect primer to hook future art enthusiasts." Publishers Weekly
Interested in art but feel under-informed? Curious but afraid you might not "get" it? Already a fan and wishing to immerse yourself in a fun, engaging, informative and informed read that will refresh and top up your Art History 101 and Introduction to Art courses from college?
The 12-Hour Art Expert: Everything You Need to Know about Art in a Dozen Masterpieces avoids the common approach of throwing hundreds of images at a reader and expecting them to learn from and memorize them all.
Instead, the book will guide its readers through a brief series of masterpieces of Western art—from cave paintings to sharks in formaldehyde. This book twelve chapters teach readers about art, the art trade, and art history in a thorough (though concise) fashion.
Each chapter is linked to one notable masterpiece, with references to others, giving readers a fixed, digestible number of objects that they will get to know in depth, and which they can use as a lens to understand the thousands of other, related objects that they might encounter in the future.
Museums can be daunting, and art presents a strange new language, one that certainly intrigues but is often intimidating and foreign. This book, written by one of the world's best-known art historians uses entertaining stories to break down intimidating barriers and invites readers of all ages for a one-stop immersion into art.

Table of contents

• List of Artworks
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Art Is for All
• Chapter 2: Is It Even Art? Defining Art and the Human Need for Creativity
• Chapter 3: Art as Object and Technique
• Chapter 4: Find Crivelli’s Pickle: Saint Spotting 101, Iconography, and the Covert Language of Art
• Chapter 5: The -isms Cheat Sheet in Thirty Paintings
• Chapter 6: The “Complete”(ish) History of Sculpture
• Chapter 7: When Bad Things Happen to Good Art: Conservation and Loss
• Chapter 8: A Digital Light in the Forest: High-Tech Art History Reveals Secrets
• Chapter 9: What Would Freud Say? Art, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience
• Chapter 10: Art and Value: The Art Market, Digitalization, and How to Shop for Art
• Chapter 11: Art History as Mystery: New Discoveries (and What Happens When the Experts Get It Wrong)
• Chapter 12: The Future of Art
• Notes on Sources
• About the Author