Abstract

This paper will present models of undergraduate art education in both creative arts and art history that are designed to plunge students into direct encounters with art in an era when digital humanities, online resources like Google images, or arenas like the art history blog are changing and challenging our understanding of art history and the place of art in the world. On the one hand, universal accessibility to the Internet has enabled each individual to construct his or her own “musée imaginaire” with astounding ease; on the other hand, the facility with which any image anywhere in the world can be obtained and manipulated to the individual user’s own ends seems to have contributed to the erosion of a shared, canonical body of knowledge that might be recognized as “The History of Art.” In particular, the paper will focus on two models: the travel seminar (discovering art through travel to specific sites) and live art (discovering art on a local scale), in which on-site, first-hand experience aims for deeper involvement in the creative process and heightened sensitivity to the connection between the art of the past, contemporary art, and individual creative endeavor.