Two abiding concerns are basic to both my teaching and to my research and writing on art: the difficulty of seeing images made at another time and place and the difficulty of matching words to non-verbal artifacts. My practice as a teacher has not developed programatically out of a sense of what I ought to teach, but responsively to the problem of how best to encourage students to look (and write) attentively and intelligently at historic art.

I use two very different techniques to call attention to historical distance: one is to reconstruct for my students how people in another time thought, saw, produced, and marketed works of art. One can quite literally change students' sense of what they have before their eyes by suggesting the world in which it was made and the manner in which it was used. Second, I call attention to the peculiar nature and strangeness of society and art. By recognizing the strangeness of the past, students can understand the strangeness of their present. When students examine the condition of art in their own society, they begin to grasp that common condition of strangeness which as historians we are out to understand.

Because we normally register our understanding of pictures in words, it follows that attention must be paid to the tricky business of matching words to pictures. Thus though I am teaching about images, I am also teaching students to read and write. I expose students to not just the newest but to the best writing and thinking about pictures, and I encourage them to be critical readers.

Over the years I have lost some of the confidence that I used to have about the lecture room as the place to get facts across. Though I insist that students learn names and dates, I am more interested in teaching them how to look, think, and write. Therefore, the course which has given me the most satisfaction to teach is the lower-division survey of the history of art. This is at once the most extensive and the most intensive of teaching experiences. It introduces students to paintings which they either have never seen before or which have been intimidating if they have seen them. I want also to show students that art constitutes a tradition in part because artists have consistently worked on certain problems they have seen as presented by the art.

Over time I find that aspects of my account of the history of Western art no longer ring true. There are important shifts in the state of the world and in the world of art. The very impossibility of ever arriving at an account of a tradition or ways of looking for once and for all, the contingency of it all and yet the persistence of our attempts to do so is at the center of all my teaching and I try to get it across to those I teach.