cleisthenes

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.

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

Actually, it does answer the question. Your question was: 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

You are an undergrad at an institution with phenomenal archives and brilliant archivists. Go into the Bancroft library and talk to someone there. People who actually do this job will be happy to talk to you about it.

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.

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.

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!

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.