Art is the perfect tool for activists to get across their message and make people pay attention. In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll learn about the centuries-long practice of iconoclasm, how art intersects with protest movements, and what happens to artists when the authorities aren’t thrilled by their acts of resistance.
What makes a painting worth millions of dollars? In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’re looking at the history behind today’s art industry and how we determine an artwork’s financial value. We’ll also learn how the big business of buying and selling art runs on imperialism, and how people in the art world are fighting back.
What’s the line between inspiration and flat-out appropriation? In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we grapple with questions about artistic originality and authenticity that have plagued the art world for hundreds of years. In today’s world of AI-generated art, it’s only getting more complicated. You will see a few AI-generated images in this video as part of our effort to dive directly into the questions surrounding AI-generated art.
Independent public art like graffiti and street art often gets a bad rap, thanks to its legal classification as vandalism. But these art forms have much to offer as a means for people to speak truth to power and take ownership of community spaces. In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll explore the various ways artists have used illicit public art to express themselves.
From giant rock sculptures to Confederate statues, there’s something about public art that cranks up the temperature of debate. In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll learn about public art’s diversity of media, how it shapes collective identity, and why it seems to cause such intense controversy.
Our cultural perspectives shape how we perceive art, including who we see as contributing to its most important movements. In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll get to the truth behind the creation of modernism and bust the myth of its European beginning. We’ll show how modernism was a truly global movement, in which far-flung artists responded to a rapidly changing world.
What counts as design? What counts as art? And how did this debate start? In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll trace the history of privileging some materials and techniques over others. We’ll explore how street fashion, dinner plates, and a swan candelabrum blur boundaries that were never clear-cut to begin with.
For centuries, “official” art spaces have shaped whose work gets taken seriously. But there are no required qualifications for making art! In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll explore amateurs and outsiders. We’ll learn how the line separating who’s in and who’s out has shifted over time — and how influences have drifted across it.
From sunsets to double rainbows, nature’s full of beautiful things. So it’s not surprising that artists have found inspiration in Mother Nature for millennia. What is surprising is the wide variety of human concerns that nature art has been used to convey. In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll learn about the ways artists use nature to make arguments about the world around us, and our place within it.
What makes some art valuable enough to hang in museums? In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll look at different ways we can figure out the value of art beyond the number on the price tag, and we’ll examine how culture, society, history, and storytelling influence how we evaluate artwork.
In this episode of Crash Course Art History, we’ll keep digging into the myth of the Great Artist, with whether we can—or should—separate artists’ personal actions and beliefs from the art they create. Art historians are exploring new ways to think about artists’ relationship to their work and how to talk about controversial art.