VISU1011: Art and Film Writing in Context

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• The module aims to acquaint students with the numerous forms and venues in which people write about art and film, and to equip them with the understanding and skills required to be effective communicators who are able to write in a knowledgeable and medium-appropriate way for a variety of audiences who may be accessing art writing online, through digital and print media, and by visiting exhibitions in person.

• The module will introduce students to the identification and analysis of the various audiences each of which comes with a particular set of skills and needs that need to be addressed through different media and types of writing.
• Using examples from museum and gallery websites (including commercial galleries), blogs, on-line and print art magazines, review sections from newspapers and general-interest magazines, exhibition catalogues, promotional material, museum/gallery panels and object captions, the module will identify the particular requirements and features of a wide variety of writing styles, and develop students ability to deploy these in conjunction with images in an effective and appropriate way.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• On completion of this module students should:
• Understand the many different publication outlets (in the broadest sense) through which art and film writing is disseminated.
• Understand the different audiences and readerships to which different kinds of publication are directed, and the specific skills and needs that each kind of audience brings to their engagement with art and film writing.
• Have theoretical and practical/ experiential knowledge of the considerations involved in writing appropriately and effectively for a wide variety of media, including of the relationship between image and text.

Subject-specific Skills:

• On completion of this module students will have developed:
• The ability to identify the target audience for different forms of art writing.
• On the basis of the above, to grasp the considerations that need to be factored in when writing for such audiences.
• In light of the above, the ability to write effectively for a variety of media aimed at a variety of audiences.
• To design a range of specimen publications that combine image and text in an effective and appropriate way.

Key Skills:

• On completion of this module students will have developed:
• independent research
• organisation
• time management
• presentation
• IT skills

• Teaching is by means of a weekly interactive seminar, allowing students to develop skills in presentation and verbal argument, as well as to develop the analytic skills required in the summative assessment.
• Assessment itself reflects the diversity of art writing in practice, and consequently allows students significant leeway to develop the structure of their portfolio. The expectation is that the portfolio will include texts of different kinds and different lengths, aimed at different audiences and presented in different media.

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