Skip to main content
WebsitebeginnerFree

CAA Reviews

Unknown

Peer-reviewed reviews of scholarly books and museum exhibitions in art history and visual studies, published by the College Art Association. Useful for tracking current debates and judging which recent monographs are worth reading.

Visit resource

More resources on Art Criticism & Theory

BookPaid

The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore (Phaidon)

Shore's primer on how photographs work — physical surface, depictive space, mental modelling, and the flatbed picture plane. Essential for architects and designers who want to understand how spatial photography is read.

CourseFree

Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art course that uses works from MoMA's collection to trace how artists from the late 1800s onward responded to industrialization, war and new technologies, teaching learners to connect artworks with the ideas that shaped them.

WebsiteFree

smarthistory.org

Smarthistory.org provides free, student-friendly art history resources through expert-led short videos and concise essays that analyze major artworks, movements, and cultural contexts from around the world. It features visual analyses, contextual histories, and thematic comparisons suitable for students and educators.

WebsiteFree

October Journal

Quarterly MIT Press journal of art criticism and theory founded in 1976, publishing essays on modernism, the avant-garde, film and contemporary practice. Reading it introduces the critical vocabulary that dominates postwar art-historical debate.

PodcastFree

The Art History Babes

Conversational podcast in which four art historians discuss artworks, artists, movements, and visual culture, alongside short episodes of quick art-history facts. Listeners pick up context on periods and debates in the field in an informal, seminar-style format.

WebsiteFree

arthistoriography.wordpress.com

Art Historiography is a blog that explores art history through historiographical theory and criticism. It offers theoretical essays, methodological reflections, and critical analyses of how art histories are written and interpreted.

See all Art Criticism & Theory resources →