New Course

My new course is Celtic Art , and the Celtic Art Revival in Scotland. I wanted to do Picts but that wasn't running this year and in fact, given my background in C19 Studies the Celtic Art Revival bit of this was very appealing. 

What was not quite so appealing was that the basic text for the course is Celts Art and Identity which was produced in association with the exhibition of Celtic Art we went to several years ago at the National Museum of Scotland. As quite often when we go to see exhibitions there the Anglocentric nature of the associated verbiage, including this book, was a bit of a pain. So I am sorry to have to give it house room as far as the text goes. The photos inside though are fabulous. The cover design perhaps not so much.

The first session was taken up with introductions, a run down on the course format and a bit of 'what does Celtic art mean to you?' type stuff. So that was all easy to cope with. I laughed when he talked about the assessments. The first one is an essay of 1500 words. As I said to the OH, 1500 words is not an essay, it's an essay plan. Even the second one, the Big One if you like, is only 2500. I daresay I'll manage to put a few sentences together when the time comes. 

For now it's a lot more reading for next week, mainly along the lines of 'there was no such thing as a Celtic people, there was no such thing as a Celtic language, there is no such thing as Celtic Art ' which rather begs the question that if this is so, why are you curating an exhibition of Celtic Art and making money by producing an expensive book to flog about it?