cleisthenes
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Posts posted by cleisthenes
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I recommend you approach it differently. Who are the key scholars in your subfield? (Or in the field at large?) Who are the people you want to work with? Figure out where they work and then make a list of those schools.
Frankly, to get into the best programs you should already be able to do this. A familiarity with the major names in your subfield is expected from the get go at top programs.
I would go to a school with strong EAS over all rather than someone who is necessarily exactly in your subfield. Even if your advisor is not an early modernist per se, you could probably cobble something together with various committee members. Really it should be someone who methodologically fits with you and would conceivably be comfortable advising your project (e.g., observe Huey Copeland advising a diss on contemporary Chinese art). But for EAS, look to Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago, Princeton. IFA has extremely strong resources of NYC and rigorous art history, good if you want to curate.
Look at dissertations in progress and completed in your subfield. That's a good way to gauge who's in the advising game and who's pushing students through (you can then google their students to see their outcomes...)
http://www.caareviews.org/dissertations/392/completed
http://www.caareviews.org/dissertations/392/in_progress -
On 8/3/2017 at 6:37 PM, Rin said:
That didn't answer the question, but thanks anyway.
Actually, it does answer the question. Your question was:
On 8/2/2017 at 6:42 PM, Rin said:I was wondering if anyone knew of a good online graduate program online in Art History (preferably with an emphasis on ancient history, but I know many MA programs give a broader range of course material).
The answer is no, unfortunately there aren't any, hence my response. I'd think this is to do with the nature of art historical pedagogy, which really requires the ability to talk about art with other people, and not just listen to your professor's lectures and complete assignments. Without that aspect of discursive training, you are unlikely to be able to engage the field in a really meaningful way, even and perhaps especially in the art world writ large.
Truth be told, there aren't even very many "good" art history programs in general, that is if you define "good" as a program that (a) employs talented faculty who are (b) active in their subfields and (c) are not primarily adjuncts, who will therefore (d) attract smart students who will create a challenging atmosphere for discourse, students who ideally (e) will not have to go into debt to attend the program. I'd cay (c) alone disqualifies all online programs I've ever heard of.
I had a look at the "Lindenwood University." It's never a good sign when they don't list their faculty.
How would you describe your goals?
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Consider this: as gross as it is, some faculty on the admissions committee may also care who the professor is in the field, their pedigree, publishing, etc. All things being equal, choose the person you think is the bigger name. If it's junior faculty versus senior faculty, choose the latter, unless it's someone so senior that their work is no longer current in the field.
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Three words: not worth it.
What do you want an MA in art history for, anyhow? Unless you can go to a decent program, you'll have zero career prospects with an online degree. If it's for love of the field, I suggest just pursue your own independent education in the subject, which is not terribly difficult given the resources at your fingertips via the internet.
If you're set on doing an MA, sounds like you're not yet in the right place in your life for it. Take some time, life your life, figure out how you can prepare yourself to make a move and then apply to programs in your field in other places that make sense for your interests and seem like a reasonable goal for you.
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IFA is on another level with regard to prestige, but Hunter isn't bad. The Graduate Center has incredible faculty, so if you can take classes there through Hunter, great.
I would go with the program that gives you better funding. For PhD admissions, either program will serve you fine as long as your research is excellent. Go to the place that will make your research experience as smooth and productive as possible, and remember that living in NYC is very, very expensive.
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Ditto to others have said about the dubious usefulness of such a list, though it's definitely interesting in other ways.
I would add, however, that getting a job as a contemporary curator involves many, many more factors than merely one's education.
Developing close relationships with prominent contemporary artists, publishing in significant venues, and curating one's own exhibitions can be as or more important than education in many contexts. The exception to that would be highly academic or scholarly museums, such as The Met or the Getty. You're not going to find any curators there without PhDs. But you WILL find them at MoMA and the Whitney, and even moreso at more cutting edge contemporary institutions. Did either of the two curators of the last Whitney Biennial have PhDs? What about the Biennial before that? Think about people like Mia Locks, Ruba Katrib, Thomas Lax... These are not people who were appointed to their jobs fifteen years ago. These are young, young curators.
If you look at most of the chief curators of the major contemporary art programs in American museums today, relatively few of them actually have PhDs. That is in contrast to smaller museums, often affiliated with Universities, which often have more of a focus on scholarship. And on the flipside, there are dozens of PhDs out there who can't land jobs in museums precisely because they don't have the experience. This is partly why certain fellowships at places like the Walker are so coveted: they often lead to full time jobs.
I don't mean to suggest getting a PhD is a bad thing. But it certainly isn't a surefire path to a curatorial job; nor is it necessary to have that particular degree in order to find a position curating contemporary art. What it is, however, is a way of supporting yourself while you build the kind of profile that WILL land you a curatorial job, and that is what smart PhD are doing these days. So you will find them curating shows, publishing, and doing fellowships before they defend, and often times taking jobs before they finish their degrees (think Elena Filipovic). There are many interesting examples of this.
As I wrote in another post today, the key thing is network. All of this is important, but it's like planting in unfertilized soil unless you build up that network, which provides the nutrients for all your work as a curator and art historian to grow. That may not be as true in other fields, but it's 100% true in contemporary.
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If you're interested in working in a museum, lawyers are always needed, but the positions are not numerous, because there are not many museums that can afford to have legal departments. Those that do have only one or two full time lawyers on staff.
Jobs may be more plentiful in the commercial art world, i.e., working for auction houses. There are also boutique law firms that specialize in art law, but it's really just practicing IP law, the subject of which happens to be artworks. Whereas if you were to work for a museum, you would be directly supporting an institution you presumably care about, possibly dealing with fun, unusual issues (e.g., legality questions about stuffing religious objects in bodily orifices in performance work, etc.), in addition to a lot of stuff you'd still do in a firm.
If you were to get an Art History PhD, and really enjoyed and excelled in scholarly and/or curatorial practice, being a lawyer (or having a JD) would, down the line, unquestionably make you a very good candidate for leadership roles in nonprofit arts administration, especially at top museums. However those are in major cities, and each city has on average one, maybe two, where you could conceivably work. You would need to be open to moving around.
I agree with the comment that no matter what, in the art world, network is everything. If you intend to go either of those routes, you should aim to do your degree in New York or London, and with Brexit, I would say NY is the way to go. If you do that, you can develop the network you need while in grad school so you can actually translate the education into gainful employment.
No matter what, it's a tough space. You need to know exactly what you want and be willing to commit fully to have any chance of being competitive.
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Re: productive non-fiction reading suggestions
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses; also, On Longing.
Elaine Scary, The Body in Pain: The Making and Un-making of the World.
Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
Bon voyage!
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I guess we will have to just disagree. I can think of a handful of folks hired at solid national and regional museums in the past 5 years with the kind of limited experience I mentioned, most with PhDs or MAs from just a few schools. People I know personally. But you don't know any. We know different people. I have also never been in a situation where "art historian" curators have matted or framed work, put nail polish on stuff (which I think used to be a common way to identify 3-d works, one sees it in archeology, dec arts, and natural history contexts, maybe those curators mentioned by the other poster are from a different generation) or fabricated their own labels. Or where labels aren't collaborative and reviewed by more than one department, not to mention been proofed by a copy editor. Typically, at mid-sized and up institutions, on-staff framers do framing, or perhaps preparators. Labels are made by communications, preparators, or the design team. And registrars are on hand to supervise the movement of art work so that climate and light levels are maintained. All of the above jobs are important and rewarding, but they are not curatorial. Nor should they be, because curators are doing the kind of research and scholarship they are trained best to do. Asking them to use the scary mat cutter would be like asking the preparator to write a catalogue essay. Each might be able to do it but not to their best, or best for the institution. Maybe we just have experience with museums of different size, programming, budget, and endowment. You made the point that there are perhaps more museum jobs out there for the taking than academic, which I agree with (there are like a half-dozen open searches in my field right now). There are also a lot of different kinds of museums, which grad students and prospective grad students reading this thread have a bit more info about due to this discussion.
I have to agree with this assessment. Sure, at very small institutions, curators might fulfill a wider set of roles. But at any of the top institutions with major collections or exhibitions programs, curatorial work is much more about art-historical training (meaning writing and research) than with the practicalities of museology. The one exception I would give is for conservation. In my field (contemporary) it is increasingly important to understand the very complex issues surrounding the conservation of contemporary art, which includes things like performance. This does not, however, extend to an understanding of how labels are fabricated. And I too know of several curators hired straight out of grad school, without the PhD, with only limited fellowship experience and little-to-no actual job experience in the museum world. Publications, however, are another story, and diss is probably the most important thing of all.
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One that comes to mind, if I am understanding your question, is Thomas Crow's excellent book Modern Art in the Common Culture. Not so much about the displacement of the terms "high"/"low" in the discourse of art history as it is, itself, a book aiming to do that work of displacement..
C.
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A few top programs in modern & contemporary that have faculty with a strong emphasis on theory include Harvard (Buchloh), Princeton (Foster), Chicago (Mitchell), MIT (Jones), Columbia (Joseph, Alberro), Stanford (Lee), Yale (Joselit), UC Berkeley (Bryan-Wilson, Davis), UCLA (Kwon, Baker). Obviously, a lot depends on your advisor, what you want out of a program, how much you care about teaching, etc. Each of these programs is very different and has strength and weaknesses. Size matters. Location matters. Funding matters (though all of the above should offer you a full ride).
Best,
C.
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I don't think there are any "must read" books. Given your interests are "theory & criticism, modernism/post-modernism and photo history," I would suggest the following selection might put you at an advantage in the discursively overcharged domain of modern and contemporary art history...
* Kant's Third Critique
* Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit and Aesthetics
* All of Marx, especially the German Ideology, Critique of Feuerbach, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1848, First chapter of Capital vol I, and The Communist Manifesto; Engels, Principles of Communism.
* Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely meditations; perhaps also The Gay Science
* All Freud
* Bergson, Creative Evolution
* Sartre, Being and Nothingness
* All major theorists and writers of the Frankfurt School, but especially:
--Walter Benjamin, Das Kunswerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (in German preferably)
--Adorno, if nothing else, - and Horkeimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung
--Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament
* All of Brecht, including essays
* Meyer Schapiro's major essays on modern art
* Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" and anything else you can read, especially Being and Time and the 1950s essays
* J.L. Austin, How To Do Things WIth Words
* Saussure
* Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author"; Mythologies; Camera Lucida
* Jacques Lacan, Écrits
* Clement Greenberg's major essays (esp. "avant-gard and kitsch," "toward a newer laocoon," etc.) and Michael Fried's, "Art and Objecthood"
* Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New
* Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible* Major texts of structuralism, especially the work of Jacques Lacan
* All of Foucault, but especially The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and writings on governmentality, biopolitics, etc.
* Major theorists in cultural anthropology: Mauss, Levi-Strauss, Geertz, Appadurai, et. al.
* Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
* Major texts of post-structuralism - I'll leave that to you, with the random suggestions of:
Jacques Derrida, all essays in Margins of Philosophy, The Truth in Painting, and Specters of Marx
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Kaja Silverman, Flesh of my Flesh
* As much as you can stomach of the criticism of the October school: Krauss, Buchloh, Foster, Bois
* Look at new publications from MIT Press, Duke, California, Chicago - Look at the Dokumenta pubs - Look at journals such as October, Grey Room, Critical Inquiry, Art Journal, Res, Representations, Third Text, Qui Parle, TDR, PAJ, Discourse, Signs, Camera Obscura, Screen and magazines like Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, FlashArt, etc.
Also, read in French and German!
This is just what comes to mind immediately - a tiny sampling of what you should probably be reading if you dream of being successful and publishing widely in these fields. You might have to read these works over again in grad school, but having already read them would give you a lot of very good knowledge. Understanding them would make you formidable!
- apotheosis and mooncake88
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That's the thing that makes me think I have wasted my dreams and my undergrad. I'm not sure what I need in a graduate program is even there. How do I carve a niche if no one can give me a shot? This person here:http://arthistory.be...lty_Fricke.html
...is the closest I really have. She does some Celtic work, but even I know that might be follow to lump that culture in with vikings. It's comparable but not the same.
I would keep in mind that Beate is on leave right now and thus may not be looking at applications, perhaps making this not the best year to be applying to study with her.
Cheers.
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Unlike fullofpink, I'm trying to find my way to a major metropolitan city for my PhD program (I really want to jump right in and see if I can't write a dissertation before 30). This is partly a personal thing, as an out gay man in a long term relationship I refuse to live somewhere where I cannot fully be me with my partner. And, to be honest, I hate non-urban living :]. Thus, the IFA, Columbia, UoC, Northwestern, et cetera are relatively high on my list and they have some fantastic people in my geographic/temporal field in addition to my ideological field (gender/queer theory). Berkeley is a dream, but I'm here for undergrad and think that moving on for graduate school is a smart move.
I don't know what your temporal focus or object of study is, but if you're interested in film, especially asian, what about Jean Ma, who works on gender at Stanford (where there's also Scott Bukatman, who writes on the body). Also, what about USC for Richard Meyer (although last I heard he might not be staying...) or Harraway at History of Consciousness.
If Berkeley is really the right place for you it's not the end of the world to do your grad work there, but I'm not sure who works on gender on that faculty. There are others in the humanities of course, e.g., D.A. Miller, Trin Minh-Ha, Linda Williams, Butler, et al., but none of them are art historians.
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It appears I'm in the minority on this one, but that has rarely stopped me from sharing my thoughts. Assuming that your senior seminar involves you conducting research in close consultation with your advisor, I would think the seminar professor would provide a more meaningful assessment of your potential and abilities as an academic. I agree that the reputation of the recommender matters, but I do not agree that the reputation is necessarily tied to title. If your advisor is well known in the field, he/she may be more recognizable and pull more weight that an associate director of your school. In all honesty I do not think you will go wrong with either, but I don't think the title alone is justification for going with the associate director.
Agreed-
In most cases it would be best to go with the Prof with whom you've worked in seminar. If the "Director" happens to be a big-name in your field and can truly attest to your abilities as a scholar...well, that could be different. But I'm guessing this person is an administrator and not an academic in your field.
Generally, a person having taught you directly in seminar is the most important basis for determining the degree to which they are capable of evaluating your potential.
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The figures were the first things I cut with my writing sample when I had page limit issues. Assuming you're working with relatively well-known works of art (the sorts of things art history professors would be familiar with and can be googled with relative ease) it shouldn't be a problem. Remember, they're assessing your ability to write and conduct art historical research, not reviewing the essays for publication. I included a brief footnote on the first page of my writing sample stating that I'd removed the images for the purposes of page limits.)
Also, I think that the text is more important than the bibliography (eg, I would NOT suggest sending 5 pages of text with a 10 page bibliography.) Simply listing sources doesn't say much about your ability as an art historian; they're just as concerned (if not more) with how you utilize and interpret the material. For schools that don't want your entire thesis, maybe choose a chapter that you think best highlights your writing/research skills with a cover letter that summarizes the project as a whole and how this particular excerpt fits in.
Ditto. Your bibliography is most definitely not the most important element of your writing sample! I can tell you that my bibliography was less than two pages (of course, I had ample footnotes). Try to make the bulk of the total material you submit consist of your best scholarly writing. Emphasis on the writing. (If you happen to be in search of a discipline where bibliographic skills probably count for a lot more, try library science.)
I think part of the issue OP is encountering is simply that a whole MA thesis is not an ideal WS. If you can extract and modify an excerpt & still have it be cohesive, then present a trimmed-down bibliography relevant only to that excerpt, you're probably better off than submitting the whole thing or just a hacked-off piece of it bleeding into a pool of citations. Better yet, use an article-length paper and edit it down to 20-25 pages (you should have something like thing or be able to produce one).
Why 20-25 pages? Obviously some schools ask for me. My personal opinion is that given how ridiculously busy everyone is, if you send more, it had better be *really* good. At least that's how I know many would probably take it, given the already jam-packed nature of their lives! Think about this, you want someone to WANT to read this. Give them something of a manageable length and you dramatically increase the chances that will actually happen (and that all your brilliant ideas will see the light of, well, at least consideration).
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I'm interested in MA programs in New York City. Can anyone tell me what they know about Pratt for art history? I've been told it has the best reputation within NYC, but I'm thinking that may be just for applied arts... How does it compare to NYU? It attracts me because it seems to be more design/ architecture oriented, but not sure if thats true.
And also, exactly how selective are the Sotheby's and Christie's programs?
If you could choose among all these, which one and why?
Many thanks!
This would all depend very much on what it is that you wish to do with your MA.
Is this a stepping stone to a PhD and ultimately a job in the academy? Do you want to be a museum curator? Do you want to work in the commerical art world (and if so, in which part)? etc.
Be more specific about your long-term goals and your subfield.
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This might be useful in a general way, with a healthy dose of interpretation for who you are and your field.
http://ls.berkeley.edu/soc/diversity/apply/personalstatement1.html
-Cle
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Definitely have to echo what's already been said about UC Berkeley. They posted a listing on CAA for one modernist at (I believe) an assistant/associate level, but assuming that position will be filled by next year, their program still won't be anywhere near as strong as it was with TJ Clark and Anne Wagner and probably won't for awhile. If you're interested in possibly going abroad, Courtauld Institute in London has Sarah Wilson, who specializes in Eastern European modern/contemporary. It's not really my area, so I don't know who the major players are or where they teach, but it may be worthwhile to look into Russian/Slavic studies programs as well as art history.
I should add that Berkeley also lost Kaja Silverman, who's now at Penn.
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On 10/24/2010 at 7:06 AM, Ramblr said:
Thanks! Your comments were so helpful. I thought so, but I wanted a confirmation. Looks like you know your stuff (even though you do disagree with me on meeting with professors, ahahha!!)
My speciality is modern/contemporary with an focus on Eastern Europe. I'm not look for a Russianist on the faculty, per se, but I would like to have someone who, at least, knows when the Soviet Union dissolved.
Any advice would be appreciated. What's your focus?
Happy to help!
I'm not a specialist on Eastern/Slavic but to my knowledge, given your interests, Chicago seems like it would probably be the best fit for you- there's both Yuri Tsivian and Matthew Jesse Jackson tenured on the faculty. Christina Klaer at Northwestern and Elizabeth Childs at WashU are another no-brainer. There's Jane Ashton Sharp at Rutgers. You might also look at UCSB, where Sven Spieker in the Slavic/Comp Lit dept is an affiliated faculty in Art History (i.e., he could sit on your diss. committee), so you could mention him in an SoP. If you're interested in film, two people I know of are Lida Oukaderova at Rice and Pavle Levi at Stanford, but I'm sure there are many more. I'm probably missing some important people but again--not my field. If you want other suggestions, I would check out edited volumes of essays that include work by the above people, and see what other scholars are included, and then research them a bit.
My field is postwar American and European, with an emphasis on Germany.
Cheers,
Cleisthenes
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On 10/23/2010 at 10:46 PM, Ramblr said:
Is anyone applying to UC Berkeley for modern/contemporary? If so, why?
I've always had it on my list. It seemed like a perennial favorite for my friends who've applied in the past. It's also a name that comes up when looking at current professors at other schools. However, I recently took a harder look, and are all its modernist emeriti??? Clark and Wagner are officially listed as "retired."
Anyone have any news on this front? Thanks in advance!
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Berkeley AH is replacing Tom Clark & Anne Wagner. There may be a search for a modernist next year, but my understanding is that they're not hiring any replacements on that level. The UCs are in bad shape, but Berkeley is by far the best off and the truth is that the problem precedes the most recent wave of crises: attrition breeds more attrition. Apparently the department is having trouble securing funding mainly due to the fact that fewer students are finishing in time, and this is only going to be exacerbated by recent events (not to mention students leaving the program due to the lack of modern/contemporary experts).
Frankly, if you want to do modern/contemporary, it's increasingly looking like Berkeley Art History is not the place. Very sad considering the illustrious history of that program. If you're into Film, you might check out the newly created Film Studies dept (previous part of the Rhetoric dept).
I would think about other options for modern/contemporary art history: Columbia, Chicago, UCLA, Yale, IFA (funding nightmare), CUNY (ditto), Harvard, UPenn, Stanford, Michigan, WashU, et. al., depending on your subfield. There are also all sorts of interesting media/critical studies programs like Brown Mod Culture & Media, MIT History & Theory of Architecture, etc. Hard to give more specific advise without knowing your subfield.
Best,
Cleisthenes
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Truthfully, I don't think I would have gotten into my program if I had not visited campus and had a great discussion with my adviser. A great writing sample is of course a must, but I also think professors look more kindly on someone who can also articulate the strong points of their scholarship and have intelligent off-the-cuff discussions in person as well. I really think it helps distinguish you from the lump of paper you're submitting as an application.
I knew someone would disagree with me on this :-)
The truth is that I've heard opinions that both agree and differ with yours on this note (from grad students and faculty on both sides). I certainly wasn't trying to suggest that it's not okay to contact professors. I'm just saying that if you do, be aware that this is going to reflect on you and be very thoughtful about how you represent yourself. If you go on campus visits, there is, of course, nothing wrong with sitting down with faculty with whom you think you might ultimately work. In fact, I think if you are visiting campus, it's a good idea. But if you are emailing out of the blue, have a good reason to do it and keep your communications succinct and on-point. If you do that, and you represent yourself well, then it could certainly improve your chances in a situation where you are being considered against an equally qualified candidate. If you walk away having impressed a faculty member to such a degree that they are fired-up about working with you, then there's no way that can hurt you and it may well help.
I suspect, however, that it was not your personal contact with faculty but the strength of your scholarship and the intriguing nature of whatever thought presented therein that resulted in your success, Risastic. I know plenty of people who had no meetings with faculty whatsoever and were still accepted across the board.
In my case, I conacted a few faculty members and not others, and my admissions/rejections had pretty much no correlation whatsoever to who I had or hadn't spoken with (some programs I had contacted admitted me, other didn't, and vise versa). Ultimately, I am attending a program where I had no contact with faculty beforehand.
So again, I would emphasize my original point: be yourself in your writing sample, produce your best work, and be confident that it is this sample of your faculties as a thinker and researcher that will ultimately gain you admission and, much more importantly, help you pursue a successful career as a writer on and scholar of art.
Best,
Cleisthenes
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I worry about all of the little things adding up like the fact that I haven't published or that I just started my second foreign language and am not that confident in the first.
It doesn't matter that you haven't published. The only imporatant places you will need to publish are in peer-reviewed journals. You are not at that stage in your career yet.
The important thing is to show the committee that you possess the potential to eventually produce publishable work (and ideally, more than just that)-- but that's your baseline. Be who you are now. Produce your best and most exciting intellectual labor. If you are thrilled by your essay and compelled by your own personal statement--truly comepelled--and *especially* if your Professors think you are good to go, then be confident. If you aren't admitted, it's probably because you chose the wrong programs and/or there are faculty match-up or funding issues (the two most common reasons for not accepting otherwise qualified candidates).
I'd really love any advice about my statement of purpose. I'm trying to figure out how detailed to be about my research interests.
Add detail when you think the details bespeak an essentially important fact about yourself, but find a way to bookend your details with generalizations about what you hope to study. Your generalizations should be eloquently wrought and convey the uniqueness of the way you see your object of study. Show your readers you have a school of thoughts that is all your own.
I don't want to be so detailed that I sound like I lack range, particularly since most of the potential advisers I'm focusing on aren't specialized in prints.
Whatever you do, do not say your dream is to study X if there is no tenured faculty member who studies X. I cannot emphasize this enough: apply only to programs where you know there will be at least one faculty member who can advise you in your dissertation and sit on your committee. If there is not such a person currently (and for the foreseeable future) tenured in a given department, you ar enot likely to be admitted.
Also, I feel like I'm already behind in contacting potential advisers but I honestly have no idea what to write in these emails. Any advice would be amazing!
Here is some advice: never contact a Professor unless you have a truly noteworthy question that couldn't be answered in another way. People disagree on this point, but my sense--based on anecdotal experience of the contexts in which I sense you are interested--is that people who do this excessively (i.e., without a very good reason for each specific contact) are frowned upon. If you cannot shine through the merits of your written scholarship alone, you are unlikely to be seen favorably by the admissions committee.
Hope that's informative.
Good luck with your apps!
Love,
Cleisthenes
Art Lawyer to Art History PhD?
in Art History
Posted
You definitely have a chance with strong grades and good recommendations (GREs don't matter, unless you completely bomb them), but you need to have a strong sense of what kind of art history you'd like to do, and who you want to work with.
Previous posters are correct that there is a strong focus on queer theory and feminist approaches to art history in both departments. But there are faculty members who diverge from that.
If you are interested in contemporary art, your best chance is to specifically frame your interest around questions of art and the law, since that is your background. Once you are accepted you can basically do whatever you want, but I would suggest your scholarly interests as an extension of your legal practice.
As someone who knows these two programs extremely well, I would suggest you have a much better shot at Stanford. Not only because there are professors who deal with the intersection of art and the broader culture, including legal culture, such as Nancy Troy and Alexander Nemerov, but also because there is generally more of an interest on the part of the university in intersections between art history and other disciplines. I might even consider doing a joint PhD and LLM with an art history advisor and John Merryman in the Law School, whose specific focus is art law.
That is, of course, unless you want to completely forego your legal training entirely. You could do that, but if you do, it may be challenging to be admitted to these programs, unless you can produce a writing sample that knocks the socks off your POI and the committee.